Wifi stops working "randomly" and only restarting the computer helps

Question

Often, but for no apparent reason, I cannot connect to the internet through the hotspot on my phone. The connection to the phone's network looks fine in the applet, but no pages will load and the phone now says no devices are connected. Disconnecting from the wi-fi connection only leads to error message "device not ready". rfkill shows no blocks. Power management is off. The phone itself connects to the internet just fine. Restarting the computer always fixes the problem, for a while. Restarting Network Manager does not, nor does anything else I've come across on the forums. Updating the kernel did not help. Help would be appreciated!

Using Linux mint 20.3, Intel Wireless 3160 This is what iwconfig shows after disconnecting the hotspot that does not work:

iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.
eno1      no wireless extensions.
wlp2s0    IEEE 802.11  ESSID:off/any  
          Mode:Managed  Access Point: Not-Associated   Tx-Power=20 dBm   
          Retry short limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off
          lo        no wireless extensions.

Before I disconnect manually, the ESSID is shown by iwconfig, even if it does not work. But on the phone, the hotspot says it is not connected to any devices! One would think this could be a problem with the phone, but other presumably available hotspots also do not show in the applet.

@ArtemS.Tashkinov Done, thanks. But "errors were encountered while processing linux-headers". Should I worry about that? — Pifagor, Jul 24 '22 at 13:46
No idea where this error comes from. If everything else works, don't bother. — Artem S. Tashkinov, Jul 24 '22 at 18:16
Sorry, the exact same problem still persists. A few hours it works, then the same and I have to reboot. — Pifagor, Jul 24 '22 at 18:53
Please try booting with `pcie_aspm=off` and see if it helps. — Artem S. Tashkinov, Jul 24 '22 at 19:16
I will. But doesn't this just adress the power management, which is off anyway? — Pifagor, Jul 24 '22 at 19:29
Do you have a VPN installed ? I get this because the VPN connection fails/restarts. When it comes back, existing connections perhaps remain in limbo — Rohit Gupta, Sep 14 '22 at 00:22
I do have a VPN, but the problems started before I got it, and it's rarely on anyway. Suspecting a hardware problem that network manager can't, well, manage. — Pifagor, Sep 14 '22 at 07:48
Could be a HW issue. Do you have opportunity to try other wifi card or other OS? — tukan, Sep 17 '22 at 16:06
@tukan That would be impractical, but the problem does seem to go away when I use the phone's hotspot through USB rather than wireless. — Pifagor, Sep 18 '22 at 20:29
You need to do more testing as it it is hard to help you without testing. — tukan, Sep 19 '22 at 06:54

agibson · Answer 1 · 2022-11-06T17:05:53.787

Some thing or things in my network goes on and off for connections also. Some devices are still working and others quit accessing sites. I have looked at status screens and settings and then would just restart IPFIRE, which is slow, then i started discovering some faster options below. This is for home use. I am running current 171. Do not know if this will help you or not. These are not approved by any body, but my self. So beware.

I have found squid (web proxy server) not running. So I restart it. I found a command that is easier than restarting the whole IPFIRE device. May not be the best way to fix things, but it is the fastest way I have found.

/etc/rc.d/init.d/squid status
/etc/rc.d/init.d/squid restart

That does not always fix the problems, squid is still running. I also found another command. This one appears to restart the whole network, but leaves the rest of IPFIRE alone. This is much faster than restarting IPFIRE.

/etc/init.d/network restart

Some times I had what appeared to be DNS issuses, this command shows the SERVFAIL that was in the logs.

for f in $(ls /var/log/messages* | sort -rV | tail -12) ; do     fl=`ls -l $f`;     zg=`zgrep -ic "SERVFAIL" $f`;     printf "%s \t %s \n" "$fl" "$zg"; done

Bottom line, I have not made the problems stop or found/fixed all the problems. I have made it so it will recover faster, when something goes awry. I will keep investigating when I have time.

Wifi stops working "randomly" and only restarting the computer helps

1 Answers1