At some point (I cannot think of any discernible cause) I started having problems accessing the internet over my home WiFi network. If I boot my laptop (or wake it from suspension), it can connect to the router with no issues, but it often fails to access the internet over the connection (indicated by the question mark over the signal strength bars). Other devices connected to WiFi have no issues what so ever.
I can temporarily “solve” the problem by forgetting the network and reconnecting to it, although this doesn’t work consistently. Sometimes the problem suddenly “fixes” itself after a while, and internet access is restored. Then everything works fine until I shut down or suspend my laptop.
I tried troubleshooting this issue relying on online guides, but I’m not sure what point is since everything works fine when it is working, and simply doesn’t when it isn’t. There doesn’t seem to be any logic to it.
Post the output from an inxi -Fzxx so we can see your specs and what kind of networking chipset you are using. (Stick it in pre-formatted text block` so it’s easy to read and gets indexed nicely for other people dealing with similar issues.)
Then we can try disabling power management for the Wi-Fi card and see if we can stabilise things somewhat.
I would also suggest checking you have the latest firmware installed via fwupdmgr just in case there’s a known issue with your Wi-Fi chipset.
I would expect BIOS updates since 2017 — check the vendor’s site. There have been similar issues with linux wifi when other systems on the same access point were configured for “quality of service” to support streaming video.
You may get useful details using journalctl —no-hostname -b -g wifi|cat.
I was more angling towards turning off power saving for the wifi device itself - given that it apparently works and then ceases to work I’m guessing it’s power saving shutting down the device or putting it into a low power state which it struggles to recover from.
This is temporary, so you can try it to see if it makes any difference to your situation, given that it’s tricky for you to replicate the issue consistently. A reboot will reset whatever the powersave state is for this device, so bear that in mind.
Your device name will likely be different to mine, but here’s the sequence of commands I’ve just used on my desktop (and I don’t use wifi on here at all, so YMMV
╰─λ iw dev wlp6s0 get power_save
Power save: on
╭─steve@lurcher in ~ took 1ms
[⚡] × sudo iw dev wlp6s0 set power_save off
[sudo] password for steve:
╭─steve@lurcher in ~ took 1ms
╰─λ iw dev wlp6s0 get power_save
Power save: off
Obviously, setting the power_save state back to on can be achieved with the relevant command.
ip link will give you the name of the device you can use with the iw command. So will iw of course but ip is easier to read I find.
GIve it a try, run some experiments, if you note no difference we can probably rule out power management and power saving from the mix