BCM 43142 Wifi drops out on PEAP network

[profwumbo]

Hello all!

My first post on the forums, so please bear with me as I try and troubleshoot some stuff. I am new to linux.

I have an HP Stream 11 Pro with a BCM 43142 Broadcom wireless card w/ bluetooth that is becoming a headache. It wasn't the greatest with Windows, but it worked.

I am on Linux Mint 18.3 Cinnamon.

When I connect to wifi at home, it works pretty well (EDIT: albeit much slower than my desktop, it gets about 30mB/s down as opposed to 90 on the other machine). The problem occurs when connecting to my University's wifi. The connection drops out every 2-3 minutes, almost on the dot. 90% of the time, it can't reconnect on it's own, but disabling and reenabling wifi tends to fix it (temporarily).

Here is my device:

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lspci -nn -d 14e4:
01:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM43142 802.11b/g/n [14e4:4365] (rev 01)

I am using bcmwl-kernel-source for the driver, instead of the b43-firmware-installer. The latter doesn't seem to work, and the former came with the distro, so I just used it.

My connection to the University network has to be manual, as trying to do it automatically causes the login prompt to repeatedly appear, and no connection. My config options:

Security: WPA & WPA2 Enterprise
Authentication: Protected EAP (PEAP)
No CA certificate is required (that's the way my other devices are set up, our IT doesn't require a certificate, or at least they haven't ever mentioned it)
Inner authentication: MSCHAPv2
Username
Password (Normally with Windows, auto configuration works fine so long as the UN and PW are correct)

This configuration is successful in establishing a connection, and does so every time I attempt to connect to the network. For some reason, however, it keeps randomly dropping, as mentioned before.

Anyone have any ideas as to what could be happening?

[JeremyB]

These issues might be caused by wifi power management, see if

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 sudo sed -i 's/3/2/' /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/*

Reboot and see if it works better

[profwumbo]

These issues might be caused by wifi power management, see if

Code: Select all

 sudo sed -i 's/3/2/' /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/*

Reboot and see if it works better

I have just done this, and am currently testing to see if the connection drops out. It hasn't yet, so I'm hopeful. I will definitely need to make sure that the problem doesn't exist in the building I am usually in, though. I wonder if that has anything to do with it....

If it does, I will take your advice, leucocyte, and take it up with IT. Maybe one of them knows why this happens.

For now, it seems to be working. I speak to you from the little laptop that could.

[profwumbo]

An update:

I have done a lot of testing, and after trying the methods suggested above, I have come to the conclusion that the nature of the problem might be slightly different than before. The internet seems to drop in certain buildings, but not others. In the ones where it drops, if I move to a different location, sometimes it will stay for a longer period of time. When I am home, I am near my router, as my apartment is quite small. Therefore...

Could it be that my connection keeps disappearing due to a weak signal? Could my Wifi card be weaker due to some power saving option unlike the one previously discussed?

I'm not sure what is going on, I just know that it seems as though the Wifi connectivity suffers quite a bit under Mint/Ubuntu.

Any other suggestions?