mint keeps loosing internet connection

[barneyblogggs]

I live in UK and my ISP is Sky.
This is their Sky Q router.
Had it about 3 or 4 years

[djph]

hm, 3-4 years on an ISP-supplied thing sounds about "right" when it comes to the device choking up.

Distance / obstructions between you and the AP may play in as well.

[barneyblogggs]

It just seems odd that it is only my LM laptop that keeps disconnecting.
I currently have in my home:
3 x ipads
1 x xbox
3 x mobile phones
which do not suffer these disconnections
2 of the ipads and 2 of the phones are normally in the same room as me when the disconnections occur on my laptop.

Regards,
barneyblogggs

[sleeper12]

Sometimes it helps to reload the driver:

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 sudo modprobe -r iwlwifi && sudo modprobe iwlwifi && sudo systemctl restart network-manager.service 

[barneyblogggs]

thanks sleeper12, I will give this a go

[Colm]

Thanks for posting the dmesg output.*

I see from your dmesg output and from another blob you posted, that your device may be switching between (at least) two different AP radios, if that makes sense to you. Are you connecting to a home router? edit: yes, I see you are Do you have more than one network set up (i.e. 2.5ghz and 5ghz? a guest network)? Or are you using a mesh setup? Or connecting to an business or institutional wifi network that you didn't set up yourself?

One AP had a MAC of a0:bd:cd:a1:aa:6d, and another was d0:58:fc:95:3e:f3.** Can you identify which radios these are? (Logging into your router and poking around in the config options should reveal answers).

For instance, one theory is that your device is confused between the 2.5ghz and 5ghz wifi networks, if they happen to have the exact same name, or SSID. If that is the case, make sure you give them separate names (like, MyWifi and MyWifi-5G). I don't know if that's the problem, but its a possibility to eliminate.

when you boot up and have a stable wifi connection, collect the output of iwconfig wlo1 and save it aside ("wlo1" presumably being the device name of your wifi card). If/when the problem recurs, run iwconfig again a few more times and see if anything is changing. Specifically you are looking for changes in "Access Point" here:

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wlo1     IEEE 802.11  ESSID:"MyWifi"
         Mode:Managed  Frequency:5.745 GHz  Access Point: 1C:B9:C4:13:44:7C   

You mentioned this happens on a wired connection too. Not sure what to make of that, but lets focus on wifi for now.

To summarize:
Make sure you have unique SSIDs for the 2.5 and 5g wifi networks, if you have both.
If you have mesh or multiple APs, disable all but one (just for troubleshooting purposes) if you can, and see if that fixes the problem.
See if you can get a before-and-after look at the output from iwconfig

Hopefully this will help pinpoint the issue.
~Colm

*Running just dmesg will output a tremendous number of lines, as you found out the hard way. you can pipe dmesg thru the tail program with dmesg | tail and that will fix your output size issue. dmesg | tail -n X where X is a number, will output the last X number of lines. the head command does the opposite of tail, FYI. You also don't need to run 'sudo' to check dmesg.

**I put the MAC addresses inside an inline code parser because otherwise the forum interprets :cd: as a image emoji. No sure if there's a better way, [noparse] doesn't seem to work here? anybody?

[barneyblogggs]

Hi Colm and thanks for the analysis.
Not that i fully understand all of this but yes, this is my own home wifi router.
It can connect to 2,4GHz channels and 5GHz channels and does so automatically.
Within in each range (not sure if this is the correct terminology) but say for example for 2.4GHz wireless, this can and does switch between 1 and 13 channels and this is set to Auto.
5GHz Wireless is, for some reason, set to 80MHz Channel 36. There is also a 40MHz Channel 36 and a 40MHz Channel 44.
Not sure what all that means but it is what it is.
Also 2.4GHz and 5GHz broadcast the same SSID.
As mentioned this is close to my limit of understanding with WiFi and I havent tinkered with it at all because of this.
The only thing I have changed is the wifi access key and the admin logon password, thats it.
I will need a bit of time to digest everything you have said and try and relate that to my router.
As for the 'wired connection' reference...no I dont use a wired connection.
I think that may have been the OP, because I kinda hijacked this thread with my observations.

Regards,
barneyblogggs

[djph]

turn off auto channels -- pick the cleanest between 1, 6, or 11 (use something like "WiFi Analyzer" for android to see the "cleanest" -- i.e. the one with the fewest number of other WiFi networks).

If you've got a few walls between the AP and your PC, knock 5 GHz back to 40 MHz too. Yeah yeah, you'll "slow it down" ... but it'll help concentrate the transmitter's power so the PC / AP can communicate better.

[barneyblogggs]

turn off auto channels -- pick the cleanest between 1, 6, or 11 (use something like "WiFi Analyzer" for android to see the "cleanest" -- i.e. the one with the fewest number of other WiFi networks)....

Thanks for the tip, and WOW!!
Using WiFi Analyser I saw that I was the only one using Channel 13. I switch from Auto to Channel 13 and the signal strength jumped from -90dBm to almost -50dBm

...then I disappeard from WiFi analyser altogether but I still have internet access so something not right there?
Using the signal meter view I am in the green just below -50dBm

Now switching back to channel graph view I am back but no Wifi is using channel 13, im confused

barneyblogggs

[user6c57b8]

As per subject. Mint keeps loosing internet connection for no obvious reason.

If it's not too much trouble you can try public Wifi hotspots in public places like McDonald's, Starbuck's, Carl's Jr. and like 19% of all restaurants. You might need the name of the WiFi hotspot and its possible password.

[Colm]

If the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz networks have the exact same SSID, that could cause a problem. Change one slightly, even if it's just one character. But it's pretty standard to have names something like, "MyWifi" for 2.4ghz and "MyWifi-5G" for 5ghz. Just changing that might fix your problem. If not, try to figure out which MAC address is associated with which device and we can go from there.

Troubleshooting wifi networks can be a steep learning curve, and it's normal to not understand everything. Definitely keep asking questions here and googling whatever you don't understand. Feel free to send me a private message if you would rather ask something in private too.

[vanPlaas]

I had the same problem today on a mesh network, with one Set IDentifier(SSID) for both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz.

I got disconnected after ~5 min and only a restart fixed it.

Here is how I solved it.

I am listing all steps I took here, in order of what most likely solved it

1. Start Menu > Network > Wi-Fi > press the cog on the wi-fi network you are having trouble with > Identity > BSSID > Choose one
2. On my router I reserved an IP for my PC
3. Start Menu > Network > Wi-Fi > press the cog on the wi-fi network you are having trouble with > IPv6 > Disable

***UPDATE***


4. That worked for me, but now internet kept disconnecting every 2 hours or so, I tried moving an AP closer but that did not make a difference.

a. I ran iwconfig in terminal and saw my power management was "on" for my Wi-Fi adapter Power Management:on

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iwconfig

b. I then edited the default-wifi-powersave-on.conf file with vi

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sudo vi /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf

c. And changed wifi.powersave = 3 to wifi.powersave = 2 then saved the file

****
Possible values for the wifi.powersave field are:

NM_SETTING_WIRELESS_POWERSAVE_DEFAULT (0): use the default value
NM_SETTING_WIRELESS_POWERSAVE_IGNORE (1): don't touch existing setting
NM_SETTING_WIRELESS_POWERSAVE_DISABLE (2): disable powersave
NM_SETTING_WIRELESS_POWERSAVE_ENABLE (3): enable powersave
****

d. restarted the NetworkManager service

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systemctl restart NetworkManager

e. ran iwconfig again to confirm power management is now "off" Power Management:off

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iwconfig

Hope this helps someone as this is the post I got when searching for the problem.

Most likely Cause - deduced it from the previous posts
1. My PC is just far enough from the closest Access Point(AP) for the network to keep on jumping between 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz.
2. I am unable to configure different SSIDs for 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz - router limitation
3. My APs have two (Media Access Control Addresses)MACs one for each 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz, so I selected the 5Ghz one as the BSSID in the steps above.