and suddenly... no wireless!

[cespinal]

Hello guys... I need you help in here,

I went to a business trip yesterday and when I got back home, no wireless!.

My pc is an HP Pavilion Dv9000 with a broadcom wireless card. I have sucessfully been using ndiswrapper since I got hardy. Now, my pc detects my home network, but the signal is in 0% and the wireless LED is ORANGE...

could you give me advice on this?
thanks

[evets25]

if the wireless led is orange, that mean that either the wireless radio switch is turned off or the device is disabled on your computer. Most laptops have some sort of button or switch on the side of the case to manually turn the wireless on or off. Make sure this is set to "on." Next, try seeing if your wireless card is disabled in ubuntu. Are you using networkmanager (default for ubuntu)?

[Potatoj316]

this occasionaly happens to me and this is how I fix it. Unplug the power of your router then unplug the power ofyour modem, now plug your modem back in, and then plug your router back in. Now wait like 5 minutes and try to connect again. this is called power cycling

[cespinal]

thanks for the quick answer. indeed, the swicth is on but there's no wireless. How do i find the latter?

next, I am using network manager but I really dont know how to get my way through it.. I just enable roaming mode and thats it

[Potatoj316]

Have you tried the power cycle? I really think that would work.

[cespinal]

let me give it a try! I will be back y some minutes

[cespinal]

mmm nopes... nothing yet maybe somehow the wireless card got disabled...

[evets25]

Yeah, try powercycling (rebooting) the router and your computer at least once.

Some things to check:
- Does your wireless network show up under netowrkmanager? Click on the little icon in the system tray.
- open up a terminal and type in the following commands, then post the output here:

iwconfig
sudo iwlist wlan0 scan
ifconfig

I'm assuming that your wireless device is named wlan0. iwconfig will show you any wireless devices, the second one lists access points in range, and the third command lists inormation about all your network devices.

To disable any network device from terminal use this command (assuming your device is called wlan0):

sudo ifdown wlan0

...and to re-enable it again do the same thing, but replace ifdown with ifup.

[cespinal]

iwconfig output is:

lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11a ESSIDff/any
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated
Bit Rate:270 Mb/s Tx-Power:32 dBm
RTS thr:2347 B Fragment thr:2346 B
Power Managementff
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

scan output: wlan0 No scan results

if config output:

ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:1e:68:2c:50:e6
inet addr:192.168.0.135 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::21e:68ff:fe2c:50e6/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:29696 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:13379 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:16863448 (16.0 MB) TX bytes:3237786 (3.0 MB)
Interrupt:252 Base address:0x4000

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:155 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:155 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:8383 (8.1 KB) TX bytes:8383 (8.1 KB)

wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:1a:73:fc:5f:74
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)
Interrupt:19 Memory:f2200000-f2204000

[evets25]

ok, so here's what that tells me:

- you have another network cable plugged in to your computer (eth0) with the ip address 192.168.0.135
- your wireless card is in fact called "wlan0"
- you are not connected to any (wireless) network
- your wireless card doesn't see any wireless networks in range.

When you right-click on networkmanager, you should see two little check boxes, one each to enable your wireless and wired network card respectively. If not, then that means your wireless card isn't being recognized by networkmanager for some reason (but your system still knows it's there). If this is still the case after rebooting, I forget how to give control back to networkmanager.

If you're on a laptop, try taking your laptop up to the router and seeing if your get a signal while standing right next to it. If you're on a desktop, double check that the antenna is plugged in, and that everything is generally connected like it should be.