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miestasmia
Asked: 2019-09-09 12:15:09 +0800 CST

WiFi stops working intermittently on 18.04 (Dell Inspiron 15 5000)

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I recently got a new laptop (a Dell Inspiron 15 5000) and have been experiencing stability issues with the wireless connection ever since I installed Ubuntu 18.04. The WiFi will disappear seemingly at random for somewhere between 30 seconds and one minute, then reappear. I have been unable to make it function any quicker by restarting the adapter using ifconfig

The issues are very similar to those described in this askubuntu question. I checked /var/log/syslog as suggested in this bug on Launchpad and did indeed find entries with avahi-daemon[xxx]: Withdrawing address record for xx.xx.xx.xx on interface_name. The suggested solution to disable ipv6 and reboot did not solve the issues.

I am unsure how to properly diagnose the issue and progress from here.

I have tried pinging various addresses while the WiFi is not working, all of which have resulted in the following message: ping: [xxx]: Name or service not known.

Likewise, rfkill list yields the following when the WiFi is not working:

1: phy0: Wireless LAN
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no

Some system information:

lspci -v:

    Subsystem: Dell QCA9377 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter
    Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 141
    Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2M]
    Capabilities: <access denied>
    Kernel driver in use: ath10k_pci
    Kernel modules: ath10k_pci

uname -a: Linux mia 5.0.0-27-generic #28~18.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Thu Aug 22 03:00:32 UTC 2019 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

wireless inspiron dell 18.04

4 Answers

  1. I've found that many Wifi related issues can be resolved by disabling the power management.

    Here's how I do it:

    Create: /etc/network/if-up.d/wifi-powerman-off
    Enable: chmod +x /etc/network/if-up.d/wifi-powerman-off

    Replace interface name

    #!/bin/sh

IWCONFIG=/sbin/iwconfig
WLAN_IFACE=<<interface name>>

if [ ! -x $IWCONFIG ]; then
    exit 1
fi

if [ "$IFACE" = $WLAN_IFACE ]; then
    $IWCONFIG $IFACE power off
fi
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  2. From the accepted answer on this question:

    You can try:

    I think I fixed it. The problem probably originated from my router settings. When I changed from 802.11n+g+b to 802.11n+g the connection seems stable. Although over time I changed quite a lot of setting in Ubuntu and my router, this seemed to do the trick.

    If the answer doesn't work notice how the question uses journalctl -xe when the connection drops to report errors. Try this on your system and update your own question with your error messages.

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  3. Just run this command:

    $ sudo service network-manager restart

    It will restart all the services of wired or wireless connections.

    • 0

  4. Solved! After trying multiple options many times, I:

    1. Went into the BIOS (F2 on Dell splash screen)
    2. Went into the Wifi section. It was already "Enabled".
    3. Turned it off (and pressed apply).
    4. Turned it back on (and pressed apply).

    Now all is good again!

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