Wireless Disconnects After No Activity

Support Xfce
1

I’ve checked the Power settings in the UI, and I didn’t see anything to help.

I connect remotely to my laptop at home using DWService. If I am inactive for any amount of time (because: work) not only am I disconnected from the remote session, but I am also disconnected from the wireless network altogether.

This means that without some individual interaction to physically be at the desktop, I am unable to remotely connect to the machine again.

How can I set the wireless adapted to connect and stay connected regardless if the display goes dark and/or traffic activity?

2

Hi!
Check power management, there has to be an option for it

3

Hi,

some wifi cards have a power managment builtin which is controlled by the driver. It is possible to disable it. Could you provide some information about your wifi?

inxi -Nxxxa

thanks

4

some wifi cards have a power managment builtin which is controlled by the driver. It is possible to disable it. Could you provide some information about your wifi?

I can as soon as I regain access to it.

@Visone I did check power management app, the yellow oval with the black lightning bolt, didn’t see anything in there. I even checked Advanced Network Management for it, too.

5

What’s the output of cat /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf …?

If it returns wifi.powersave = 3 try changing that value to 2. I’ll advise as to how if you need that. :slight_smile:

6 
Network:

Device-1: Realtek RTL810xE PCI Express Fast Ethernet vendor: Toshiba
driver: r8169 v: kernel port: 2000 bus ID: 01:00.0 chip ID: 10ec:8136
Device-2: Broadcom and subsidiaries BCM43142 802.11b/g/n vendor: Lite-On
driver: wl v: kernel port: 2000 bus ID: 05:00.0 chip ID: 14e4:4365

When I arrived home this evening, the system said that the wireless connection needed to be re-validated? I rebooted the OS and it loaded with no issues and no request for additional validation.

7

Does toggling the WiFi connection off and back on help? (from the panel network icon).

8

What’s the output of cat /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf …? If it returns wifi.powersave = 3 try changing that value to 2 . I’ll advise as to how if you need that.

Interestingly enough, that file isn’t listed in that directory…? When I manually navigated to there, there were no files listed in the conf.d directory.

Also, it seems to disconnect regardless if there is an active connection to it or not. While obtaining the information for my previous post and obtaining the information that you had requested, the wireless disconnected again. I walked into the other room and had to click on ‘Connect’ twice to get it to reconnect to my SSID.

9

I would suggest the solution of @BG405 . If no file there, create one:

sudo nano /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf

and add this there

[connection]
wifi.powersave = 2

Explanation:

NM_SETTING_WIRELESS_POWERSAVE_DEFAULT (0): use the default value
NM_SETTING_WIRELESS_POWERSAVE_IGNORE (1): don’t touch existing setting
NM_SETTING_WIRELESS_POWERSAVE_DISABLE (2): disable powersave
NM_SETTING_WIRELESS_POWERSAVE_ENABLE (3): enable powersave

Source

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10

Just checked and it doesn’t exist on mine either. Thanks @megavolt for posting this.

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11

I had to create the file, but I did that (yay Nano is in ArchLinux =) and rebooted the computer.

Going to test the connection for a few hours remotely and see what happens, but thanks @megavolt, I appreciate your assistance with this.

12

So uh, what’s plan ‘B’? =/

Connection lasted about an hour and then dropped. Since it’s asking me to re-authenticate to the SSID … is it maybe a keyring thing or something like that?

13

Then it is needed to investigate what really happens there :slight_smile:

Could you run:

journalctl --follow

and post the log here when it happens again?

Maybe a full log would be also good:

journalctl -b -0 > ~/journal.txt

The log is in your home folder.

14

Sure can, will activate that tonight and see what we receive from that in the morning.

Thanks again!

15

Opted for the detailed log, which was toggled.

16

I checked the home folder this morning, no log file.

However another thing that I discovered last night was an installation of a toolset for laptops, “Laptop Mode Tools Configuration”.

I opened that and was first greeted with a message stating that it’s running as root.

Under the General tab though, I could see that there were some options checked for power options on the wireless card.

I’m going to see if I can remove the application so that it no longer controls those devices and see what happens after that.

17

It seems that the removal of Laptop Mode Tools Configuration with the combination of setting the default to off on the power manage aspect of the device seems to have corrected the issue.

I was able to step away for lunch and when I logged back in I was able to re-connect to the desktop remotely.

I’d like to thank everyone that helped out with this, and took tolerance for a Arch-N00b like myself. I’m sure that I’ll have more questions to ask in the future, I’m happy to know that there are knowledgeable people that I can obtain answers from.

Thanks to all!

1 Like
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