USB Ethernet dongle stops working after reconnect

USB Ethernet dongle stops working after reconnect

[Ivan Popovych]

Hi, I have an unused laptop that I want to try experimenting with
Guix on. Since builtin network controller uses nonfree firmware to connect
to it to network I got some USB Ethernet dongle which uses RTL8153 chip
and it works when I boot system but if I try to reconnect it or let it
idle for a bit then it stops working with dmesg printing that nonfree
firmware loading is disabled.

Since it does work on boot is there some way I can make it always work
even when reconnecting it?  Maybe it uses some other driver on start &
reconnecting breaks it as it tries to load nonfree one?

lsusb -t outputs that the driver this dongle uses is r8152, which I
assume is nonfree as it is the same one that is being reported as
disabled in dmesg.

Re: USB Ethernet dongle stops working after reconnect

[Ivan Popovych]

Ivan Popovych <ivan@ipvych.com> writes:

> Hi, I have an unused laptop that I want to try experimenting with
> Guix on. Since builtin network controller uses nonfree firmware to connect
> to it to network I got some USB Ethernet dongle which uses RTL8153 chip
> and it works when I boot system but if I try to reconnect it or let it
> idle for a bit then it stops working with dmesg printing that nonfree
> firmware loading is disabled.
>
> Since it does work on boot is there some way I can make it always work
> even when reconnecting it?  Maybe it uses some other driver on start &
> reconnecting breaks it as it tries to load nonfree one?
>
> lsusb -t outputs that the driver this dongle uses is r8152, which I
> assume is nonfree as it is the same one that is being reported as
> disabled in dmesg.

Figgured it out, I just needed to restart networking service... Probably
just installing something like network-manager will make it work.  The
cause of it stopping working on idle is probably due to some usb power
saving that I will need to figure out (though it should also be fixed by
something like networkmanager).