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skoh-fley

Member

Registered: 2012-03-10

Posts: 10

Broadcom wifi soft block won't release

Hey there, I'm trying to get my wifi up and running on my late 2011 MacBook Pro with a BCM4331 wifi controller.

When I run netcfg on my network's profile, I get

# netcfg home
:: home up
Successfully initialized wpa_supplicant
rfkill: WLAN soft blocked
Could not set interface wlan0 flags (UP): Operation not possible due to RF-kill

But when I try to unblock, nothing happens:

# rfkill list
0: hci0: Bluetooth
	Soft blocked: yes
	Hard blocked: no
1: phy0: Wireless LAN
	Soft blocked: yes
	Hard blocked: no
# rfkill unblock all
# rfkill list
0: hci0: Bluetooth
	Soft blocked: yes
	Hard blocked: no
1: phy0: Wireless LAN
	Soft blocked: yes
	Hard blocked: no

Here's my /etc/network.d/home:

CONNECTION='wireless'
DESCRIPTION='A simple WPA encrypted wireless connection'
INTERFACE='wlan0'
SECURITY='wpa'

ESSID='This is the run'
## Uncomment if the supplied ESSID is hexadecimal
#ESSID_TYPE='hex'
KEY='goomba2012'

IP='dhcp' 

# Uncomment this if your ssid is hidden
#HIDDEN=yes

My connection information:

$ ip link
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT 
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
2: enp2s0f0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state UP mode DEFAULT qlen 1000
    link/ether 3c:07:54:30:03:97 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
3: wlan0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state DOWN mode DEFAULT qlen 1000
    link/ether b8:8d:12:30:82:4c brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

And here're my related loaded modules:

$ lsmod | grep -E 'b43|bcm'
b43                   362413  0 
mac80211              432338  1 b43
cfg80211              179435  2 b43,mac80211
ssb                    51756  1 b43
pcmcia                 46261  2 b43,ssb
bcm5974                 9019  0 
bcma                   28684  1 b43
mmc_core               90305  4 b43,ssb,sdhci,sdhci_pci
usbcore               174100  6 btusb,uhci_hcd,uvcvideo,ehci_hcd,usbhid,bcm5974

Any help on this would be appreciated. Thanks!

olive

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2008-06-22

Posts: 1,490

Re: Broadcom wifi soft block won't release

Although I do not have problems anymore with the recent kernels, I had experienced similar problems in the past (with the rt73usb wlan driver). My solution was to recompile the kernel with the rfkill option disabled (CONFIG_RFKILL) (really disabled, not compiled as a module). If you can't find a quicker solution, I would try it; chances are great that it will fix your problem.

skoh-fley

Member

Registered: 2012-03-10

Posts: 10

Re: Broadcom wifi soft block won't release

Thanks olive. Miraculously, that worked. I did exactly as you said and suddenly running `netcfg home` connects to my home network just fine (though not without complaining that it can't open RFKILL).

It gets under my skin that I have to entirely disable something as useful as rfkill just to get wifi working, so I will probably fiddle with this once in a while to try to see if there is another way. If I find anything, I'll report back.