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Sir Sure E. Nuff

Member

Registered: 2014-01-24

Posts: 14

[SOLVED] Wireless interface gone after using hardware switch

Today I accidentally pressed the "Toggle wifi activation status" key on my HP laptop. Since then, I am not able to connect to wireless networks anymore.

I have been using Gnome 3.12 for a while now without pressing this key (which has been in "Wifi activated" state all the time since the upgrade to the latest Gnome version). The reason I emphasize my using the latest Gnome Shell version is that in Gnome 3.10 pressing the wifi key worked without problems, i.e. I was able to toggle the status of the wifi hardware by using this key.

Since pressing the key, the wireless interface that was there prior to the accident (which was named wlp2s0) is gone. Neither

ls /sys/class/net/

nor

lspci

make the interface show up anymore. I spotted one interesting line that is printed out during booting the laptop:

$ dmesg | grep 'error'
[   17.831004] hp_wmi: query 0x1b returned error 0xea74

hp_wmi seems to be the driver for the wireless card. Has anybody else encountered the same problem?

Last edited by Sir Sure E. Nuff (2014-05-14 07:55:03)

grandtheftjiujitsu

Member

Registered: 2013-07-27

Posts: 91

Re: [SOLVED] Wireless interface gone after using hardware switch

 iwconfig

Should let you know what your network interfaces are (if you're using iw to manage the network).  You could also check for hardware hard / soft blocks using

 rfkill --option 

.. though I'm not sure off the top of my head what the available commands / options are except for

 sudo rfkill unblock all 

The hardware might be blocked, especially if you can still connect to the internet via wired connection (can you?).

Sir Sure E. Nuff

Member

Registered: 2014-01-24

Posts: 14

Re: [SOLVED] Wireless interface gone after using hardware switch

Thank you! rfkill unblock all did the trick. For some reason the wireless interface was indeed blocked.