Ubuntu - My wifi suddenly stopped working

Question

Yesterday, I was working on some orchestration on my Ubuntu LTS when "poof", the WiFi stops working.

I immediately went to check on my router to see if the dog hadn't chewed off a cable. But it was fine.

Then I tried to reconnect to my WiFi network, to no avail. To do so, I tried both the GUI way using the Network Settings on Ubuntu and CLI command:

sudo iwconfig wlan0 ap my-private-ap

None of this worked and I needed to investigate. I want to share with you a few steps you can follow to check what might be going on.

I’m voting to close this question because this belongs on https://askubuntu.com — stdunbar, Aug 10 '23 at 21:06

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 10 '23 at 21:04

The first thing I wanted to make sure of is that there was no hardware problem with my network interface. To do so, I used the iwconfig command.

$ iwconfig
>>> lo        no wireless extensions.

enp1s0    no wireless extensions.

wlan0    IEEE 802.11  ESSID:off/any  
          Mode:Managed  Access Point: Not-Associated   Tx-Power=off   
          Retry short limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off

As you can see, my wlan0 card is visible to my machine, so the hardware seems fine.
Then I tried restarting the NetworkManager.

sudo systemctl restart NetworkManager
sudo systemctl restart NetworkManager.service

This restared the network service but didn't fix my issue. As I could see that my wireless interface was off, I tried to turn it back on:

$ sudo ip link set wlan0 up
>>> RTNETLINK answers: Operation not possible due to RF-kill

Aaah, finally some usefull information. For some reason my wifi interface got rf-killed.
I verified this by using the rfkill command:

$ rfkill list
>>> 0: hci0: Bluetooth
        Soft blocked: no
        Hard blocked: no
    1: phy0: Wireless LAN
        Soft blocked: no
        Hard blocked: yes

This showed me that my WiFi interface got hard blocked. A hard blocked interface cannot be unlocked by software, this usually means that there is a hardware switch somewhere on the pc.

After looking around on my keyboard I noticed little WiFi logo on my F4 key. So I pressed Fn + F4 and ... problem solved.

This problem was stupid and easy to fix. I didn't even know that I had that kill switch until now. Must have pressed it by accident while working.

Anyways I hope this little solution will be of help for someone in the future.

Ubuntu - My wifi suddenly stopped working

1 Answers1