Sporadic "disconnections" on hotspots

Asaf K. · 2017-10-04 15:56:58

I've been using Arch on my laptop (Dell XPS 13 9360 (early 2016)) for almost a year now. It's mostly great. But there is something that started happening a few months ago.

I will often use my phone's hotspot for internet access, and it works just fine. But from time to time (and the intervals have been fairly inconsistent in time and length), it will stop working. It shows that I'm still connected to the network, and sometimes it doesn't recognize the network at all, but no traffic goes through. I have to manually initiate a reconnection in order for it to work again.

I have literally no idea. Running dmesg, there seem to be nothing new between the last reconnection and the recent "network death".

But here's the weird part. This happens literally only with hotspots, or modem/routers which are basically cellular internet modems. Not with the university internet, not with the internet back at my old apartment, or the apartments I've visited in the last couple of months.

Does anyone have any idea what I can do to find the problem?

ewaller · 2017-10-04 16:13:20

What are you using to control your network? What is the output of systemd list-unit-files --state=enabled ??

Asaf K. · 2017-10-04 16:16:48

I believe that the answer to the first question is NetworkManager, and to the second:

$ systemctl list-unit-files --state=enabled  
UNIT FILE                                   STATE  
org.cups.cupsd.path                         enabled
autovt@.service                             enabled
dbus-org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.service enabled
dbus-org.freedesktop.nm-dispatcher.service  enabled
getty@.service                              enabled
lm_sensors.service                          enabled
NetworkManager-dispatcher.service           enabled
NetworkManager.service                      enabled
ntpd.service                                enabled
org.cups.cupsd.service                      enabled
systemd-timesyncd.service                   enabled
org.cups.cupsd.socket                       enabled
remote-fs.target                            enabled

13 unit files listed.

I should mention that my girlfriend is next to me surfing just fine from her laptop (using my phone as a hotspot), whereas I had three disconnections in the past hour. And this is not due to my phone because I stayed at a friend's place where the internet was a modem-router using a cellphone service, and I experienced the same frustrating disconnections.

ewaller · 2017-10-04 16:24:12

That is correct, you do appear to be using NetworkManager. I had asked, because the symptoms you described can be caused by multiple services competing for control; for example if you were to run netctl and NetworkManager at the same time. Based on that output, that does not seem to be your problem.

Asaf K. · 2017-10-04 16:25:26

I imagine that in case of competing services the problem would not be limited to cellular hotspots. Which oddly enough, is my case. But in any case, this is indeed not the case here.

Asaf K. · 2017-10-09 11:34:28

This morning I had shut down my hotspot, I imagine after this type of "disconnect", and when I came back to the computer about 25 minutes later, it showed that it is allegedly connected to the hotspot (but the signal strength was 0).

Maybe that can somehow advance this problem...

Asaf K. · 2017-10-15 13:03:18

Okay, so it seems that this is a problem similar to https://askubuntu.com/q/697945 but I have a different card (the driver is ath10k_pci), so the solution doesn't actually help me.

And the NetworkManager does not differentiate between WPA and WPA2 anyway, not it lets me to choose AES or TKIP.

Arch Linux

#1 2017-10-04 15:56:58

Sporadic "disconnections" on hotspots

#2 2017-10-04 16:13:20

Re: Sporadic "disconnections" on hotspots

#3 2017-10-04 16:16:48

Re: Sporadic "disconnections" on hotspots

#4 2017-10-04 16:24:12

Re: Sporadic "disconnections" on hotspots

#5 2017-10-04 16:25:26

Re: Sporadic "disconnections" on hotspots

#6 2017-10-09 11:34:28

Re: Sporadic "disconnections" on hotspots

#7 2017-10-15 13:03:18

Re: Sporadic "disconnections" on hotspots

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