wlan0 Stopped Working After Laptop Battery Died
 

I'm using a MSI Wind u100 Netbook running Slackware 13.1

I'm very new to Linux but trying my best to learn it. I configured my card to work on my hidden network and worked flawlessly. Even connected to the college network just using the iwconfig wlan0 essid "ESSID" so it didn't effect my configuration files, came home, connected to my hidden network just fine again. I got a little careless, but I was also curious to see what would happen if my battery died cause I knew it wouldn't take much longer. Curiosity killed my wireless... I do have to use dhcpcd at startup since I haven't wrote the script to start it during startup so usually I type that and I'm connected to the internet. Since my battery put my computer into standby and I've restarted multiple times, iwlist wlan0 scan comes back saying that there was no scan results, iwconfig doesn't show essid at all, editing the rc.wireless.conf and inet1 files don't change anything at all, and ifconfig wlan0 down/up does nothing. Have searched for quite awhile with no success and it's getting late so I'm hoping there's someone out there that has the simple solution to this stupid problem.

I appreciate any patience y'all show towards my ignorance.

Let's see the output of a few commands

ifconfig -a
iwconfig wlan0
lsmod

The output for ifconfig -a is(this is just the wlan0 part):
Output for iwconfig wlan0:
Ok, for you to get the output for lsmod, you're gonna have to give up the secret on how you're able to paste so much code into these forums because I refuse to believe that everyone hand types everything like I just did for the past 2 outputs.

Forgot to mention that I also used my Ubuntu 10.04 Live CD to boot up also to see if I could get my wireless working in it (which is usually a task Hellen Keller could perform) and I came up empty handed.

The secret is redirects. So in this case if you used something like this at the console:

iwconfig wlan0 > wlan0.txt

See the > sign? That redirects the output to whatever is on the right. In this case it would be a text file called wlan0.txt, which you could open in any text editor. If you do a little googling on redirects, you'll find they are one of the most useful tools Linux has to offer.

By the way, if you look at the lspci output, can you see what chipset your wireless card uses? That would help.

This might sound stupid, and I apologize, but check to make sure you didn't accidentally switch the card off. The switch on mine is easy to accidentally toggle.

Aside from that, I wanted to see ifconfig -a in it's entirety to see if any other network devices were active.

Thanks on the redirect info. I'm just on my phone right now so I can't get you the output of those commands just yet but I will as soon as i can.

Don't worry about giving me advice that sounds stupid, you never know when it is somehing like that. My laptop doesn't have a physical switch though and its a Fn+F key that toggles it so I know i didn't turn it off while in Slackware. I thought about that though and thats one of the things I tried to troubleshoot while I was booted up with my ubuntu live cd. Turned it off, back on, no change.

Another thing, again I'm not at my computer so I can't see the chipset of the WiFi card but I know its a Realtek R8187SE. There maybe a T after the R but i can't remember. I know there isn't an L. I know thats sometimes in the names of realtek chips.

EDIT: The wireless is Realtek RTL8187SE, just never saw that in Windows for whatever reason, but the lspci showed that.

Ok, I got the txt files from the output of the commands, here they are:

ifconfig -a:
iwconfig wlan0:
lsmod:
Also, I'm trusting y'all will give me a legitimate answer to this, by having my MAC addresses and inet address visible, am I leaving myself open to venerabilities? I don't feel like it's much of a threat but I'd rather ask a stupid question and know I'm safe instead of kicking myself later on for not clarifying.

Just block them out or fake them. It isn't a real security issue, but no sense in putting information out there you don't have to. However, in your case, that isn't a real IP address, it is one of the temp/fake addresses used when a DHCP server can't be found.

So what I'm gathering from your output is:

- The driver is loaded as there is the r8187se module in your lsmod output. According to the driver description, your chipset should work with that.

- According to iwconfig, you're not connected to an access point. I suspect that you haven't really configured the wireless card.

Since you're using Slackware, you really want to install wicd, which is a great tool for managing network connections. You'll find a package for wicd in the /extra directory of the Slackware install disk. Install it with installpkg, then go to /etc/rc.d and make sure rc.wicd is executable and then run it (or reboot). From your GUI, open a console and run wicd-client. That will bring up a GUI that will let you configure your card and request an IP address. If you ever find yourself with only console access, wicd-curses does the same thing as wicd-client, only without a GUI.

That's where my problem is though. My card was configured perfectly. I was connected to my hidden network, used the command iwconfig wlan0 essid "College SSID" to temporarily switch, came home, reconnected to my network perfectly, and while using Lynx Browser my laptop died and it hasn't worked since. Editing the files rc.inet1.conf and rc.wireless.conf do nothing to change my output of the iwconfig command. I'm actually wanting to use the GUI as little as possible because I'm using this to learn. Otherwise I would use Ubuntu like I use to and stay as ignorant as I was to commands.

I did go back and read your original post, and you are seeing odd behavior. A powerdown should just mean that the parameters are re-loaded on boot. The only thing I can think is that something got corrupted during an unclean shutdown like a battery running out of juice. You may take a look at your log files (/var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog) and the output of dmesg to see if the driver or the wireless hardware is complaining about anything during boot. By the way, hiding your SSID really does nothing to increase security and in this case may actually be causing a problem. Some drivers have historically had problems with hidden access points. Just for giggles, you might turn your SSID broadcast back on and see if that helps.

Could you post the relevant bit of rc.inet1.conf and your rc.wireless.conf? By the way, if you check out AlienBOB's wiki entry (one of the Slackware developers) he recommends just using rc.inet1.conf.


I do understand your point, but I've always found wireless to be one of the areas where not using a tool like wicd is more annoying than anything else. I guess part of it is I connect to a number of different access points, and I've found wicd to be a huge time-saver. Not to mention I've always found Slackware's official approach to be kind of cumbersome when it comes to wireless networks. It kind of expects you to be connected to a single network.

I believe I may have found in the syslog where the unclean shutdown occured. It's repeated for awhile:
I know hiding my SSID doesn't do much, it's just hidden because usually I have WPA2-AES encryption and I threw that it there for kicks. I know that isn't my problem because it worked perfect before. If it doesn't work once my card starts scanning then I'll change it to test, but right now the command iwlist wlan0 scan says that there are "no scan results" whenever I have 3-4 neighbors that have visible networks. It also happens instantly, doesn't even pause to make it look like it scanned.

I attached the part of rc.inet1.conf that is relevant. I know it's an ugly file, but it was getting the job done. I didn't worry about cleaning it up because eventually I want to be able to re-enable my WPA2-AES security and configure Slackware for it.

To humor y'all I tried scanning with my wireless broadcasting and what I expected to happen, happened. It immediately came up with "no scan results" because the card isn't scanning.

This is actually after a fresh Slackware install that I just done. I kinda half-assed it and looking back it didn't save any time. When I got to the part of using the cfdisk utility I just erased the old boot partition and made the new one one the same free space. I was hoping my problem would have at least been fixed by that but I should have formatted the swap and extra partition as well. I'll probably do that tomorrow because if that doesn't fix it then I don't know what will. Thank you all for all the help though.

Yeah, that unclean shutdown definitely did some damage. I'm surprised that fsck wasn't forced on the next boot. Can I ask what file system your using (not really relevant to the wireless problem, just curious).

I noticed one thing, namely that you've got the WPA configuration commented out. If you're not starting wpa_supplicant manually, that may be the cause of the problem. Scanning should still work however. Also, until this is sorted out, you might consider keeping this to just the bare essentials. You've done things like preventing modifications to resolv.conf, ntp.conf and the gateway. For now, you might let DHCP handle this stuff and then add it back in once the problem is sorted out.

Have you looked in the log files after doing this? I'm really hoping that there is some complaining in there.

Given the corruption on the disc, a reformat and install seems like a pretty sane thing to do.

I'm using ext4 for the file system.


I only have wpa-supplicant commented out for now because I turned the security off on my wireless temporarily just to make this a lil easier to figure out. I'll be sure to also comment out the lines that prevent modifications to the other files though.

Not right after. That would be the smart thing to do huh. I will this afternoon when I have some more time and get back to you on what I find out.


Yeah, another thing I'll do this afternoon is do a complete reinstall with formatting the swap and extra partition as well so I'm not cutting corners. Thank you.

Check your BIOS settings. I don't have an MSI Wind, but I do have an ASUS EeePC, which does have BIOS > Advanced > Onboard Devices Configuration which disabled my Camera and WLAN when I let my battery run down hard once. Apparently something caused it to lose or reset the BIOS, and the initial state appears to be Disabled for those.

Another time the battery ran down, that didn't happen, but I also plugged it in within a couple minutes to recharge, and BIOS had not changed. But the first time it ran down, I didn't get back to recharging it for over a day, so it sat for 24+ hours without any power.