This was all very straightforward but as the laptop in question is a 6 year old Dell to get the WiFi working I needed to install a new driver.
From the Ubuntu wiki the command:
lspci -vvnn | grep -A 9 Network
Gave this output:
Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY [14e4:4315] (rev 01)
4315 is not listed in the above link but using this successfully got the WiFi working:
sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer
Now, all this worked very well for some weeks until after a restart the WiFi decided not to connect at all.
I looked at the logs from
cat /var/log/syslog
Sep 5 20:42:27 jonathan-Inspiron-1764 avahi-daemon[926]: Registering new address record for fe80::9a27:20f7:ee67:8a6a on wlan0.*.
Sep 5 20:42:28 jonathan-Inspiron-1764 dhclient[5211]: DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 5 (xid=0x600e0419)
Sep 5 20:42:33 jonathan-Inspiron-1764 dhclient[5211]: DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 11 (xid=0x600e0419)
Sep 5 20:42:44 jonathan-Inspiron-1764 dhclient[5211]: DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 18 (xid=0x600e0419)
Sep 5 20:43:02 jonathan-Inspiron-1764 dhclient[5211]: DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 16 (xid=0x600e0419)
Sep 5 20:43:10 jonathan-Inspiron-1764 NetworkManager[940]: <warn> [1504640590.6173] dhcp4 (wlan0): request timed out
Sep 5 20:43:10 jonathan-Inspiron-1764 NetworkManager[940]: <info> [1504640590.6174] dhcp4 (wlan0): state changed unknown -> timeout
Sep 5 20:43:10 jonathan-Inspiron-1764 NetworkManager[940]: <info> [1504640590.6338] dhcp4 (wlan0): canceled DHCP transaction, DHCP client pid 5211
Sep 5 20:43:10 jonathan-Inspiron-1764 NetworkManager[940]: <info> [1504640590.6338] dhcp4 (wlan0): state changed timeout -> done
Sep 5 20:43:10 jonathan-Inspiron-1764 NetworkManager[940]: <info> [1504640590.6345] device (wlan0): state change: ip-config -> failed (reason 'ip-config-unavailable') [70 120 5]
Sep 5 20:43:10 jonathan-Inspiron-1764 NetworkManager[940]: <info> [1504640590.6350] manager: NetworkManager state is now DISCONNECTED
Strangely, this seemed to be a symptom of not using the b43 driver. So I decided to try the following:
- Connect to router by ethernet and update
- sudo apt-get remove firmware-b43-installer
- sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer
- Reboot
