HP dv6000 and Broadcom BCM4311 Network manager wireless disappears

English Network/Internet
1

I have HP DV6000 with Broadcom wireless, which Suse sees as BCM4311.
The PC works fine under 11.4 (64bit) if it weren’t for the wireless which occasionally drops and it won’t wake up.

This PC has a hardwired button to turn wireless on/off and whenever the signal drops Network manager “unsees” the wireless card, the error is
“wireless is disabled”

/sbin/lspci -nnk gives me

03:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN [14e4:4311] (rev 02)
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company BCM4311 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller [103c:1374]
Kernel driver in use: b43-pci-bridge

sudo /usr/biniwconfig returns

When up:

wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:“Name”
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: (numbers)
Bit Rate=48 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm
Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=70/70 Signal level=-38 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:18 Invalid misc:58 Missed beacon:0

When down:

wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:off/any
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated
Tx-Power=off
Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off

When the wireless drops the card buttons which has a light which changes from blue to yellow. I am thinking that it might have to do something with the power state as this usually happens when the system goes on batteries. Maybe I need to tweak something in those Power Management values or it gets disabled when running on battery/changing power state?

It doesn’t always do it right away when going on battery and it drops it sometimes when connected via its PSU.

I used ifup for a bit to see how things look on there and it is the same thing, signal gets dropped.

Any help will be appreciated.

2

I am only concerned at the moment about the drops when you are connected to the
power. After we learn what is happening then, we might be able to solve the
battery issue.

Unfortunately, iwconfig output only tells you the state of the interface, but it
never says “why”. For that, you need to see what the output of dmesg says when
the network drops. In addition, please install the rfkill utility and post the
output of ‘/usr/sbin/rfkill list’ after the wireless drops.

When the network fails, please try the following:


sudo /sbin/modprobe -rv b43
sudo /sbin/modprobe -v b43

Did that restore the network?

3

Thank you for the quick response.

The drops when running on power are very rare so it might take a few days to replicate, I’ll post as soon as it happens.

4

While wishing you success trying to reproduce the problem, please next time post your computer output between CODE tags (as lwfinger did): http://forums.opensuse.org/english/information-new-users/advanced-how-faq-read-only/451526-posting-code-tags-guide.html

5

@lwfinger - I did get the drop and running

sudo /sbin/modprobe -rv b43
sudo /sbin/modprobe -v b43

didn’t repair it, “wireless is disabled” in Network Manager, reboot fixes the issue.

6

Replicated it twice, it does cut off and the wireless disappears from Network manager after running the commands you suggested.

7

Any ideas?

8

Just a thought, have you verified you’re running the latest wireless driver available?

Assuming you have the Wireless Drivers repo enabled, you can update your entire system

CODE}
$zypper up
{/CODE}

HTH,
TS