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slepy8

Member

Registered: 2023-05-06

Posts: 5

[SOLVED] Dell XPS 9350 can'tconnect to WiFi

TLDR edit: Laptop lost ability to connect to WiFi after authentication changed to WPA3. After rolling back to WPA2 connectivity has been restored.

Hi everyone.

Patient: Dell XPS

For at least  two years everything worked flawlessly. But few days ago I stared was having problems connecting to WiFi networks. After some tries it was eventually connecting.
Today it died completelly.
When I use 'nmtui' SSIDs are listed. When I try to connect, it just hangs with connection notification.

when I run

 dmesg | grep firmware 

I get:

Direct firmware load for brcm/brcmfmac4350-pcie.Dell Inc.-XPS 13 9350.bin failed with error -2
Direct firmware load for brcm/brcmfmac4350-pcie.txt failed with error -2
Direct firmware load for brcm/brcmfmac4350-pcie.clm_blob failed with error -2
Direct firmware load for brcm/brcmfmac4350-pcie.txcap_blob failed with error -2

What can I do to troubleshoot this problem? How should I diagnose it?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Last edited by slepy8 (2024-03-21 11:58:19)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 22,387

Re: [SOLVED] Dell XPS 9350 can'tconnect to WiFi

Those errors are almost certainly normal, don't grep for firmware, look at the surrounding log -- that a wifi module fails to find certain firmware and eventually falls back to something that's available is completely normal. If you're able to scan for SSIDs then the driver is "working", you'd have to look at the logs when it fails. Generally speaking you probably want to opt for broadcom-wl: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Broadcom_wireless

For more relevant context please post the full outputs of

sudo journalctl -b
find /etc/systemd -type l -exec test -f {} \; -print | awk -F'/' '{ printf ("%-40s | %s\n", $(NF-0), $(NF-1)) }' | sort -f

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_o … n_services

Last edited by V1del (2024-03-21 10:18:25)

slepy8

Member

Registered: 2023-05-06

Posts: 5

Re: [SOLVED] Dell XPS 9350 can'tconnect to WiFi

As long as the machine is not connected to internet (and I don't have cable) it's not possible for me to copy/paste anything

However I looked through journal and found nothing interesting (except for "BIOS Firmware is broken").
But I just found out that problems began when I changed WiFi authentication to WPA-3. Switching to WPA-2 solved the problem.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 22,387

Re: [SOLVED] Dell XPS 9350 can'tconnect to WiFi

Well yes that driver/hardware will not have support for WPA3

You can always redirect into a text file and USB walk to a system with internet

Consider marking as [SOLVED] by editing the title in your first post (might have to shorten it... and maybe take the opportunity to mention the actual issue directly when doing so)

Last edited by V1del (2024-03-21 11:30:04)