wireles "on demand" (rfkill ?)

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wireles "on demand" (rfkill ?)

Postby juergen_harms » Apr 14th, '11, 09:36

On my laptop (Dell Latitude D820) wireless works perfectly. However, the rf kill switch must have been on when the laptop is booted. Would be nice to be able to activate wireless on a running system.

After some googling, I found that rfkill might be the thing I need - and there is an rkill package in Mageia, which I installed. But there is only a partial success:

    - rfkill list correctly prints a list of wireless devices and their status
    - when I - on a running system - switch the wireless switch to "on", the status of "hardware blocked" status goes from "on" to "off"
    -when I do: "rfkill unblock 0" (0 is the index of the wlan obtained by rfkill list) also the "software blocked" status goes from "on" to "off".
But that is all - I still do not manage to see any WLAN, I still cannot activate the (already correctly configured) wireless interface (using drakconf or the command-line functions in /etc/sysconfig). Rfkill seems to do the easy things - report the settings -, but appears not to trigger any action in the system when the switch goes to "on".

Does somebody have experience with rfkill? Probably some additional action needs to be configured in order to activate WLAN in the system when it is switched on. In case it is not a simple configuration question or a user-error, is this a thing to be pursued in the testing process of Mageia?
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Re: wireles "on demand" (rfkill ?)

Postby rom1dep » May 7th, '11, 22:21

And what if you
Code: Select all
service network restart

?
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Re: wireles "on demand" (rfkill ?)

Postby juergen_harms » May 8th, '11, 09:53

The following sequence of actions works
  • Assuming:
    • The rfkill package is already installed
    • The WLAN interface is configured to start at boot (may be better not to - once this procedure has been made to run smoothly)
    • Your system has been booted with the RF-kill switch disabling wireless networking
  • Set the RF-kill switch to enable wireless networking
  • Use rfkill to unblock blocked WLAN interfaces
    • do "rfkill list" to obtain a list of blocked interfaces
    • Foreach <n> where a WLAN interface is blocked, do "rfkill <n> unblock" (I have a "phy0" interface - no idea what it does, to be sure, I also unblock that interface)
  • Kill any ifplugd process still running for wlan0 (normally, the failed attempt at bootstrap-time has left a corresponding ifplugd process which would make network restart unhappy)
    • find that process with "more /var/run/ifplugd.wlan0.pid"
    • kill the process
    • do "rm /var/run/ifplugd.wlan0.pid"
  • do "service network restart"
And my wireless interface is running. That can be cast into a small script, but Linux should be capable to do this on its own - probably an (enhancement ?) bug should be submitted

Plain network restart does not work:
[root@ltjuergen harms]# service network restart
Shutting down interface eth0: [ OK ]
Shutting down loopback interface: [ OK ]
Bringing up loopback interface: [ OK ]
Configuring wireless regulatory domain [ OK ]
Bringing up interface eth0: [ OK ]
Bringing up interface wlan0: RTNETLINK answers: Operation not possible due to RF-kill
RTNETLINK answers: Operation not possible due to RF-kill
Sorry, there is already an instance of ifplugd for wlan0 running.
[FAILED]
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