Bugzilla – Bug 1144950
WIFI no longer working after update
Last modified: 2021-11-01 09:07:19 UTC
When starting up, my laptop no longer shows WIFI connections in the network manager widget of the KDE system tray. The WIFI checkbox is there and enabled, the network card is recognized, but there are no connections listed. The command "iwlist wlan0 scan | grep ESSID" correctly lists all available WIFI connections. However "nmcli dev wifi" does not, which I understand is a sign the network manager is failing to detect them. Later on I managed to find a workaround: Running "sudo systemctl restart NetworkManager.service" after login causes all the WIFI connections to appear again and the laptop automatically connects to my router successfully. But if I restart the machine, I need to run this command again to get WIFI running. The issue started after I upgraded to a new version of openSUSE Tumbleweed today, after roughly one week since the last "zypper dup" update.
Created attachment 813401 [details] ip address
Created attachment 813402 [details] iwconfig
Created attachment 813403 [details] sudo systemctl status NetworkManager
Created attachment 813404 [details] sudo journalctl -b -t NetworkManager
I'm intrigued by the following error message, which directly specifies that Wifi is going to be unavailable: Aug 08 18:13:39 linux-qugf NetworkManager[1269]: <warn> [1565277219.8370] supplicant: failed to acquire wpa_supplicant proxy: Wi-Fi and 802.1x will not be available (Error calling StartServiceByName for fi.w1.wpa_supplicant1: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.TimedOut: Failed to activate service 'fi.w1.wpa_supplicant1': timed out (service_start_timeout=25000ms)) I did a forced update of the wpa_supplicant package but this didn't help.
Upon suggestion, I temporarily removed /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections and almost everything from /var/lib/NetworkManager, after running "sudo systemctl stop NetworkManager.service" and ensuring the service was down (the system tray icon disappeared to confirm this). No results after restarting unfortunately, this is probably not an outdated cache issue.
Created attachment 813497 [details] sudo hwinfo --network
It seems I managed to find a permanent solution, which was pointed out in the early stages of this issue. Funny enough it was the NetworkManager Wait Online service causing it. Likely because WIFI doesn't activate at boot time, and without a LAN cable plugged in the machine doesn't have early internet connectivity thus the service errors out. I disabled it as a boot time optimization after looking it up and seeing that it's useless, but after restarting I noticed all my connections are immediately working again. sudo systemctl disable NetworkManager-wait-online.service As that service is pointless on my laptop and I have no reason to re-enable it, I can consider the issue resolved in my case. This still isn't normal behavior and will likely cause headaches to other users, so I'm leaving the discussion open for the team to debug it. I'd suggest booting a machine that's not connected to the internet via any connection that can be immediately detected (eg: cable internet) to get a complaint from NetworkManager Wait Online, then seeing if this causes WIFI connections to be missing after you log in.
Maybe Jonathan is interested in this NetworkManager problem so add him in cc list.
Hi Mircea It's been quite some time since you reported this issue. Can you confirm whether this issue still exists in latest Tumbleweed? Thanks.
I haven't been using openSUSE for a while. Haven't seen the issue during the course of the past year however. I'm assuming this might have been fixed, though I can't currently provide further testing unfortunately.
(In reply to Mircea Kitsune from comment #11) > I haven't been using openSUSE for a while. Haven't seen the issue during the > course of the past year however. I'm assuming this might have been fixed, > though I can't currently provide further testing unfortunately. A quick look at the information you provided. wpa_supplicant failed to start, which seems to be the main reason why no wireless connection is enabled on start-up. But there is no detailed information on wpa_supplicant. Further debugging becomes impossible. Based on your feedback and the fact of lacking detailed wpa_supplicant logs, I'm closing this issue now. Feel free to come back and re-open this issue if you encounter this problem in the future when using Tumbleweed. Thanks.