Re: Can't reconnect to WiFi easily

[Felix Lechner via <help-guix@gnu.org>]

Hi,

On Fri, Oct 21, 2022 at 4:41 PM Luis Felipe
<luis.felipe.la@protonmail.com> wrote:
>
> I had to switch to using WiFi to access the Internet and
> it hasn't been a nice experience.

My household has three computers that use Wifi exclusively—one
desktop, and two laptops. All of them are from 2015. I upgraded them a
week ago, but commit 4716cea is only two days old.

I use a non-free kernel. The Wifi drops very rarely if at all; once a
week at most. My remedy in Gnome 3 is to disable the Wifi and to
re-enable it again. I never restart the Shepherd service.

Your problems could be related to recent linux-libre updates such as
commit 92a71b46. Which kernel do you use currently?

> I know WiFi networks are not that stable, but my system/machine
> seems to be the only one that can't recover from connection failure.

The output of 'lsusb' or 'lspci' might tell readers more about your
Wifi endpoint.

It's also possible your central equipment is failing, although that
seems less likely. Last year, I replaced a flaky Cisco E2500 that had
run well under OpenWRT for ten years. It started disconnecting in the
summers, when it got hot. Maybe you are in the Southern hemisphere. Is
everyone using 5 GHz or are you still on 2.5GHz while the other folks
have upgraded?

Since you are using Gnome, I should point out that I see some strange
behaviour from GDM, or perhaps elogind. All my NFS clients and servers
will block any NFS traffic after about 20 minutes when GDM is active.
I usually try to switch to a virtual console but when I forget, a
reboot is my sole remedy.

> I see no other option but rebooting. But that also fails.
> For example, when I tell GNOME to reboot, the process
> hangs in a black screen

Do you use or did you recently enable any suspension features? Some
Wifi cards do not wake up properly and require a reload of the kernel
module. You can try unloading manually with 'modprobe -r'.

Kind regards
Felix Lechner