Wireless Network goes off after a while

[Elleni]

I have installed a wireless usb wifi card which works quite well with 88XXau driver installed by net-wireless/rtl8812au_aircrack-ng ebuild offered by pentoo overlay. After a while the network goes down and I am able to re-enable it by issuing rmmod 88XXau followed by modprobe 88XXau.

I tried different driver versions but it happens always after some time beeing online.

As this is my main desktop and is not moved around I am wondering if there is a way to simplify my wifi setup to a more static way of connection, maybe get rid of network manager completely? Or what could be the reason for those brakes? And how can I get stable connection?

I dont think it is a problem of wifi router as this only happens on this box, but not on my mobile phone - at least I did not notice this until now.

dmesg does not show anything and following the last part of /var/log/messages when this happened:

[Elleni]

in the meantime I am wondering whether this could be a problem on the modem/router of my isp, so I am wondering how I could troubleshoot or at least find out the source of the problem. Anyone has an idea please?

Playing around with router settings shows that it gets bether if I limit 20/40/80 Hz setting to 20 although this setting limits speed to 289 Mb/s. It still breaks sometimes, but not that often. Also rebooting the modem/router makes wifi connection more stable but after some time it breaks again.

And as soon as I unload module with rmmod and restart it with modprobe I am able to connect again. I also tried with fixed channel and 802.11ac instead of 802.11n/ac mixed or 802.11a/n/ac mixed. This is for the 5 Ghz band.

The same happens on 2.4 Ghz, there I have setup 802.11g/n mixed avoiding the b.

I have also put 24 hours lease time and disabled all sort of firewall settings, reserved ip, but I was not able to get a stable connection yet.

In network log of the modem/router I have the following messages from time to time - just in case that could be of any help for finding the source of this instabilities:

[mrbassie]

[deagol]

Is restarting wpa_supplicant also fixing the problem?

If yes, it could be that your AP is rekeying the PTK key. Kernel 4.19 detects and warns when this happens, but for any older kernels you can only see that in the wpa_supplicant debug logs.
So with 4.19 you would get a warning about rekeying ptk0 with a driver not supporting it.

[Elleni]

Hi deagol,

wpa_supplicant service is not started. I did just plug in usb wireless stick and compiled the corresponding kernel module 88XXau. Rest was handeled automatically (by NetworkManager/udev?)

Would you suggest to disable NetworkManager and configure wpa_supplicant instead? And how would I do this?

I am using gentoo-sources-5.0.6 kernel.

[deagol]

Networkmanager is also using wpa_supplicant. In my setup (systemd) I simply can call "systemctl restart wpa_supplicant".
That should terminate any encrypted WLAN connection and Networkmanager will then reconnect once wpa_supplicant is available again.

If that works chances are it's not directly the driver but something related to encryption.

[Elleni]

Unfortunatelly I dont use systemd. I see that it is installed, but the service is not started. I dont know, if networkmanager uses it, as

[deagol]

Is restarting the NetworkManager reconnecting you again?
That would be more or less the same as restarting wpa_supplicant.

If that helps we need debug logs.

As a shot in the dark you can first try a 4.19 or greater kernel. If it logs a warning about "Rekeying PTK for STA ... " it's most likely the issue I know about.
(There is even a slim chance it fixes the issue, but you still would get the warning)

[DaggyStyle]

[Elleni]

[Elleni]

[Elleni]

It's much more stable with wpa_supplicant, but lately I lost network connectivity again, and could not connect to my 5ghz ssid, only 2.4 ghz was working, until I removed wifi kernel module 88XXau and re-added it again, after that it reconnected to 5ghz network successfully. At that time I got aware, that I have ipv6 enabled and I started thinking if this could be the source of the disconnects from time to time, so I now put -ipv6 in make.conf and recompiled world, I also removed ipv6 from kernel and created /etc/sysctl.d/01-disable-ipv6.conf with net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1, finally I will switch off ipv6 on the modem too, and check, if that way it gets rock solid finally.

[Elleni]

Just for the record, after having removed ipv6 support on my gentoo box, the wireless connection is rock solid without any interruption for many days. I maybe will even re-enable NetworkManager some day.