Ubuntu Wi-Fi Troubleshooting Guide

September 5 2024 12:40am • Est. Read Time: 2 MIN

Wi-Fi connection keeps dropping for no reason:


Use the Wi-Fi Power Save Utility to turn off Power Save. This can lead to greater wi-fi stability.


My Wi-Fi is slow or behaving oddly


Use the Wi-Fi Diagnostic tool to gather a report. This can be passed along to support or used yourself to spot areas where your wireless internet might be behaving oddly.


My Wi-Fi is STILL dropping or freezing


Use the Wi-Fi Drop Tester to see if we can spot when and why it's dropping. Drops usually happen during frequency switches on some networks or even during a sudden signal strength drop. This tool and the Wi-Fi Diagnostic tool can shed a tremendous amount of light on the subject.



Wi-Fi applet is not visible, Settings>Wi-Fi is also empty:


If you prefer to do most of the above manually and avoid the wi-fi fixer tool, options are provided below.


- Is something blocking Wi-Fi?


rfkill unblock all


Then check it:


rfkill


It should indicate both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are unblocked.


- Are your Wi-Fi driver modules loaded?

Intel

lsmod | grep iwlwifi


- If not, let's try loading them:


sudo rmmod iwlmvm && sudo modprobe iwlmvm


MediaTek


lsmod | grep mt7921e


- If not, let's try loading them:

sudo rmmod mt7921e && sudo modprobe mt7921e



- Still no applet for Network Manager? Connect to Ethernet using our Ethernet expansion card. Let's reinstall Network Manager and reboot.


sudo apt install --reinstall network-manager


- Is the Wi-Fi radio detected and turned on?


nmcli


- Nmcli is not showing anything? Let's check the radio:

nmcli radio


You should see:

WIFI-HW  WIFI     WWAN-HW  WWAN    

enabled  enabled  enabled  enabled


If the radio can't be found, it's time to look into the config files:

ls /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/

This will show you all the remembered connections you've made. Let's take a look at the one you're trying to connect to.

sudo cat /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/NameOfNetworkYouAreConnectingTo.nmconnection

This should displays something that looks a lot like:

[connection]
id=NameOfYourNetworkYouAreConnectingTo
uuid=(hidden for this article)
type=wifi
interface-name=wlp0s20f3


[wifi]
mode=infrastructure
ssid=NameOfNetworkYouAreConnectingTo


[wifi-security]
auth-alg=open
key-mgmt=wpa-psk
psk=YourSecretWiFiPassword


[ipv4]
method=auto


[ipv6]
addr-gen-mode=stable-privacy
method=auto


[proxy]


If yours looks different, then you would want to copy the output and reach out to support or the community for assistance. If it does look similar, it's probably correct and we can move on. If it looks wrong, reach out to support with the output from above.

Now assuming you've made changes to Wi-Fi power savings and you tried to do it on your own, let's make sure this didn't break something - this breaks the ability for the Network Manager indicator if malformed to appear.