wifi and bluetooth no longer work

Moriah · Posted: Sun Dec 10, 2023 2:30 am Post subject: wifi and bluetooth no longer work

I had not moved my laptop from my desk where it uses a wired ethernet connection and a wired mouse for maybe 2 years. Back then both wifi and bluetooth worked. I recently took it away from its old home and now neither wifi nor my bluetooth mouse will work. I have not upgraded the kernel during that 2 year time, but I have upgraded periodically except the kernel. What might have bit-rotted? Any ideas.

Here is a sample session when I try to connect to wifi:

sublogic · Posted: Mon Dec 11, 2023 1:13 am Post subject:

Moriah · Posted: Mon Dec 11, 2023 12:30 pm Post subject:

Thanks! I'll give it a try. The router is just a temporary setup, but its working for everybody else, so I'm going to leave it alone. One the servers get moved into this building and we have our permanent internet connection, we will have a whole new wifi setup. If they changed a flag, and the router we have now uses that mode, that could be an explanation for what i am seeing. I am busy all morning, but I will try your suggestion this afternoon.
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Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21635

Sometime within the last two years, TKIP support was disabled by default. TKIP has been deprecated for many years. We had quite a number of forum threads from users who found that with TKIP disabled, if their router offered TKIP at all, wpa_supplicant failed. Disabling TKIP on the router was preferred and would get wpa_supplicant to negotiate a working setup, but it became very popular to instead re-enable the insecure and deprecated TKIP support rather than fix the router.

Moriah · Posted: Mon Dec 11, 2023 6:52 pm Post subject:

Thanks Hu! As I said above, this is just a temporary setup that will be phased out in a month or so. I don't want to rock the boat for others for whom the router works fine. There are no servers here yet, just laptops, phones, tablets, etc. I am mostly ruinning an ssh tunnel to use vnc to run the servers at the old location until they get moved here. They are still laying down the floor for the server room...
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Moriah · Posted: Tue Dec 12, 2023 4:19 am Post subject:

Re-emerging wpa_supplicant with USE=tkip did the trick; however, the clunky router/access-point has such a weak signal that my data rate is intollerably slow, so I will probably have to move my laptop, as the cable the router is connected to is not long enough to let me move the router. I was able to connect my wifi to the cellular hot-spot, and that worked fine, but of course that doesn't solve the traffic limit problem.

I guess I will go back to tethered connection to the hot-spot for now. Maybe I'll get one of those wifi repeaters...
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Moriah · Posted: Tue Dec 12, 2023 8:56 pm Post subject:

I added a second wifi access point to the cable modem. This new one has more power. I now have a reliable and strong signal and everything is working very well.

Thanks for everyone's help!

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The MyWord KJV Bible tool is at http://www.elilabs.com/~myword

Foghorn Leghorn is a Warner Bros. cartoon character.