LinuxQuestions.org - Why is WiFi enabled on a machine with no radio?

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- - Why is WiFi enabled on a machine with no radio? (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-networking-3/why-is-wifi-enabled-on-a-machine-with-no-radio-4175648220/)

Why is WiFi enabled on a machine with no radio?

I am working my way through the various nmcli commands to try and get a handle on them. The machine in question is a Dell Precision workstation with NO radio nor WiFi connectivity. I found this curious

Code:

ken@taylor21:~$ nmcli radio

WIFI-HW  WIFI    WWAN-HW  WWAN    

enabled  enabled  enabled  enabled

I would also be interested to know what the WIFI-HW and WWAN-HW are. I can turn WIFI and WWAN on and of but not the two -HW entities. I did some searching and did not find an answer. I did find a question which speculated that -HW referred to hardware. If this is so... how could non-existant hardware be enabled???

TIA,

Ken

nmcli con show

nmcli dev status

nmcli dev wifi list

This might help us on this. I get the feeling that your results are just some oddity rather than actual results but we will see.

Quote:

Originally Posted by taylorkh (Post 5961467)

Code:

ken@taylor21:~$ nmcli radio

WIFI-HW  WIFI    WWAN-HW  WWAN    

enabled  enabled  enabled  enabled

I would also be interested to know what the WIFI-HW and WWAN-HW are. I can turn WIFI and WWAN on and of but not the two -HW entities.

my guess:
this output is very similar to 'rfkill list' output; apparently there's soft and hard switches for each radio device.
And I think that WWAN is the same as mobile broadband. could be wrong though.

Thanks jefro,

As requested

Code:

[ken@taylor20 Desktop]$ nmcli con show

NAME                            UUID                                  TYPE      

enp0s31f6                      2adeb10a-865f-4e88-ae75-e29bb950303a  ethernet  

se-au-01.protonvpn.com.udp1194  0a1a6b43-1e1c-47f6-8e02-b7ebecee6f24  vpn      

se-fr-01.protonvpn.com.udp1194  ce7eb7d7-f0ec-4303-a77f-efd5fdb4d578  vpn      

se-hk-01.protonvpn.com.udp1194  3d580471-0ae9-43bb-bf0a-7ffa7172ff59  vpn      

se-jp-01.protonvpn.com.udp1194  cd369b22-8466-4772-979a-911a8a27b942  vpn      



[ken@taylor20 Desktop]$ nmcli dev status

DEVICE    TYPE      STATE      CONNECTION 

enp0s31f6  ethernet  connected  enp0s31f6  

vmnet1    ethernet  unmanaged  --        

vmnet8    ethernet  unmanaged  --        

lo        loopback  unmanaged  --        



[ken@taylor20 Desktop]$ nmcli dev wifi list



[ken@taylor20 Desktop]$ nmcli radio

WIFI-HW  WIFI    WWAN-HW  WWAN    

enabled  enabled  enabled  enabled

The above was on my physical workstation. Just for the heck of it I ran the commands on a CentOS 7.6 VM in VMWare player on the workstation

Code:

[ken@vmProton75 Desktop]$ nmcli con show

NAME  UUID                                  TYPE      DEVICE 

ens32  4858e3a0-6f4a-42a2-a3e2-d94578d513bc  ethernet  ens32  



[ken@vmProton75 Desktop]$ nmcli dev status

DEVICE  TYPE      STATE      CONNECTION 

ens32  ethernet  connected  ens32      

lo      loopback  unmanaged  --        



[ken@vmProton75 Desktop]$ nmcli dev wifi list



[ken@vmProton75 Desktop]$ nmcli radio

WIFI-HW  WIFI    WWAN-HW  WWAN    



Thanks ondoho,



WWAN is described as mobile broadband in the man page. NOTHING I have found tells me what the -HW variations are.



Ken

enabled  enabled  enabled  enabled

Indeed WWAN is wireless wide area network.

HW I have to assume is Hardware.

This wrong reporting has been submitted as a bug to RH. Not sure if they ever fixed it or discovered why.

My feeling is that the wan driver or chipset has some oddity.

Thanks again jefro,

It certainly is an oddity. The same thing occurs on Ubuntu and Mint virtual machines on my workstation with no radio. It is not a show stopper by any means.

Ken

p.s. As you are a moderator, let me ask... Should I mark this thread as "solved"? It is not really solved but neither is it worth further effort. Please advise.

You have to make that choice. If you want more opinions, you can maybe leave it as it is. Hopefully someday someone will remember this and make a new comment.

Your other commands in network manager command line interface will provide you with clues to how to manage networks.

On your issues you have to understand that there is a lot going on. It may seem simple to blame nmcli but in reality it is really the billions of chipsets out there and folks to either get inside information to make a driver or have to wing it and make a driver. The driver and chipset both in my wild guess are at the core of this more than the manager is. (wild guess still)

I have attempted in the past to "close" threads with solved but if the question is interesting folks still want to put their 2 cents in :) Which is OK.

As to hardware and drivers etc. Things really have gotten a lot better. I submitted a bug against Red Hat 8 (pre RHEL/Fedora) about my US Robotics external modem. Anaconda detected it during the OS install but it was not there after the first boot. I do not think that bug was ever addressed. 10 years ago CentOS 6 Anaconda would not detect the NIC in my Dell Studio XPS 8000 desktop. It would not install networking programs. However, if I put in a $5 generic Ethernet card from my junk box it was recognized and when I did the first boot I had TWO NICs! I pulled the temporary card and ran the same installation for 7 years.

Other than a couple of video cards which went off support by CentOS during that time I have really had pretty good luck as far as hardware goes.

I am making good progress on getting a handle on nmcli so I will just ignore things which I KNOW are not there. There are enough thing which ARE there for me to deal with :D

Ken