After a recent update in fedora 43 on my ThinkPad W530 I lost wifi and cabled network access. Obviously this is a problem. A clean reinstall a few days ago with a new update just recreated the same problem, so I assume this has not recently been fixed.
The result of ~$ sudo dnf history info can be seen in this pastebin.
The first time I went in to look at a description of recent updates I saw a lot of updates around connectivity to fix a security bug. Appart from networkmanager itself there were updates to bluetooth, adsl, wifi and so on. If this is where the problem is caused then I’m really not sure what to do. If a fix is on the way then it might not arrive until f44. This is reasonably old hardware from 2012 but works great (the update caused no problems on my newer thinkpad p52).
(I thought I would try and boot with a different kernel but with an encrypted disc I couldn’t easily see how to do this. This would not really fix the security problem though.)
For both connections the state is down, meaning non active/switched off/not connected. My laptop has both wifi and wireless as well and because I don’t connect the wired one to the router also its state is down.
Since you are able to write here you must have a working internet connection on an other device, so your router/switches (and what else you have) must be working.
As Barry also wrote, try to boot into an older kernel. Apparently the error is somewhere in your computer.
Hi @jandemus yes the state is down for both. For Wifi I can try many times to activite wifi in the GNOME Settings GUI. Most of the time it will appear to turn on and it will see the nearby connections, but it fails to connect to anything. Sometimes it doesn’t even seem to turn on.
I tried putting a network cable in earlier, and that didn’t work either. There is no cable connected as I answer these questions.
I’m writing now from the same machine with the previous kernel 6.17,1-300,fc34.x86_64. Networking fails with kernel 6.17.12-300.fc43.x86_64
You really should be using ‘nmcli’ the command line tool for network manager. Typing ‘nmcli’ will show if you have any connections. Using ‘nmcli -h’ to get brief help instructions. And using ‘nmcli c’ when you are ready to make a device connection, or view their state.
Also, Gnome settings has pretty detailed setup for the networking devices. Have you tried using it to verify/modify as necessary your network settings?
@ducan The journal may have details that can help us understand the error. It can take some effort to filter out the mass of irrelevant details in the journal. Start with journalctl —no-hostname -b -g wifi. You can compare with output from the older kernel.
Many systems support network booting over wifi. They load a stripped down driver before booting an OS. A new kernel may require changes to vendor firmware. Sometimes toggling the wifi netboot support in UEFI/BIOS works around an issue. Posting hardware details may get advice from someone with similar hardware. You can use inxi -Nzxx for just network or inxi -Fzxx for a more complete report that may catch the attention of others with similar hardware. Problems with WiFi after installing newer kernels are not unusual, so if WiFi is essential (e.g., while travelling) it is wise to have a USB WiFi dongle with in-kernel support.
Just FYI, you can always execute any command temporarily with the ‘C’ locale to get English output, saves you some work manually translating (my system also doesn’t use an English locale):
~$ LANG=C nmcli
enp8s0: connected to enp8s0
"Realtek RTL8125 2.5GbE"
[redacted]
tailscale0: connected (externally) to tailscale0
"tailscale0"
tun, sw, mtu 1280
inet4 100.64.0.2/32
[redacted]
lo: connected (externally) to lo
"lo"
loopback (unknown), 00:00:00:00:00:00, sw, mtu 65536
inet4 127.0.0.1/8
inet6 ::1/128
DNS configuration:
[...]
Use "nmcli device show" to get complete information about known devices and
"nmcli connection show" to get an overview on active connection profiles.