Power management and wireless network management

[jensoko]

Hopefully, someone can help me troubleshoot this irritating little problem with my netbook (thinkpad x100e).

If I leave the netbook up and plugged in, but inactive for about an hour and a half, the screen goes dark. It's not in suspend as far as I can tell (there's a moon-light icon that isn't lit up) and as far as I can tell, it's not in hibernate, either. When I wiggle the trackpoint or press a key, it wakes right back up...but the network connection doesn't seem to. In knetwork manager it would drop the connection some time within five minutes of waking back up--If I had a browser up, I could surf until the connection went away. Whenever it would try to re-connect, either automatically or by me prompting it through the graphical interface, the wireless would hang up on "configuring interface." Sometimes I'd get a prompt from the network manager for my WPA password, sometimes not. Either way, it took a full restart to bring wireless back.

Using wicd, when the wireless attempts to reconnect, I get hung up on "authenticating" but do not get a prompt. I have gone through and ensured that I removed all the knetworkmanager packages after installing wicd, and wicd connects fine when I boot up and stays connected while I use the computer.

Near as I can tell, this has something to do with power management. On occasion (and I can't seem to pinpoint what actions or series of actions cause this with any consistency), I will unplug the AC power, move the computer to another room, and plug back in, and within five or ten minutes, lose the wireless and fail to reconnect as above.

I'm looking for guidance as to how to troubleshoot this so if it is a bug, I can be of some use in reporting it, or if it's some other setting, I can explore changing the settings to make it work properly. I bought the netbook so as not to be so tethered to either AC power or one spot, and so far, it's a mostly positive experience marred by some irritatingly persistent burps I'd like to get ironed out.

Thanks in advance for any help!

JenSoko

Thinkpad x100e

HIghlights from lspci:

01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RS780M/RS780MN [Radeon HD 3200 Graphics]
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 03)
03:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Device 8172 (rev 10)

[maestrobwh1]

Re: Power management and wireless network management

It might be related to this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ux/+bug/513883

And this is helpful: http://www.linwik.com/wiki/using+the...th+ubuntu+9.10

Even though that is for 9.10, it seems that the issue of dropped connections seems to be an issue.

My laptop also has a realtek wireless device and it proved to be flaky at best. Mine comes up as

Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Device 8171 (rev 10)

I had to install a package from a ppa to get the device to even connect (or I could have compiled the driver but the ppa was a dkms package so it would stay current with the kernel).

https://launchpad.net/~matt-price/+archive/mattprice (it looks like this will still work for you if you read the second website above where it says the driver is the same)

...but I don't know if your device uses the same driver? You might want to check out the realtek driver and see if it is available from source.

I tried the wicd thing like you did but that didn't help my situation either.

My issues were similar by symptom but less frequent and peculiar. It was more like my driver just crapped out and I just needed to unload and reload it.

It also happened when the computer tried to suspend but it hung up like yours did. I created a script and put it in /etc/pm/suspend.d/ and called it "97quirk" which prevented the "botched suspend" and allowed the machine to suspend and wake properly 100% of the time.

I thought it was network-manager, but I think it not working properly was a symptom of some other things. A hunch tells me there is a bug with suspending the realtek driver before the machine suspended other key processes so it left itself in an unclean state at the suspend attempt.

#/bin/sh
# hold off suspend for tasks to complete
case $1 in
  suspend|hibernate) sleep 5;;
  resume|thaw)    ;;
  *) exit $NA ;;
esac
exit 0

I still got occasional odd issues with the wireless being present but not working when I was just using the computer so then I created a script to stop network manager, bring down the interface, unload the driver, then restart everything in reverse order. The last line "sudo -u ubuntu knetworkmanager" should have "ubuntu" changed to whatever your user name is and the appropriate wicd executeable. The rmmod and modprobe would also have your device listed after it. (use "lsmod" and scroll to find out what module you are using - it might be the same)

#!/bin/bash
service network-manager stop #(/etc/init.d/wicd stop)
sleep 1
killall -9 knetworkmanager #(killall -9 wicd-gtk)
ifconfig wlan0 down
rmmod r8192se_pci #(use your driver module)
sleep 1
rm /var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state (not needed for wicd)
modprobe r8192se_pci  #(use your driver module)
ifconfig wlan0 up
service network-manager start #(/etc/init.d/wicd start)
sleep 1
sudo -u ubuntu knetworkmanager #(replace knetworkmanager with wicd-gtk)
exit 0

Until 2.6.32-22-generic came out (last lucid kernel), the wifi didn't even work without the ppa or compiling the driver from source. I kept the mattprice dkms package installed even with the most recent kernel because it still seems to give me a more reliable driver.