Disabled wireless networking in Ubuntu

February 1st, 2011

I'm sure Ubuntu has never liked me very much, and one particular prank it has played on me, again, is to disable wireless networking.

Symptoms:

No wireless connectivity, "Enable Wireless" in the networking drop-down is greyed out.

Solution:

Run rfkill list and check if anything is blocked


neebone@Neebone:~$ rfkill list
0: phy0: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: yes
1: hci0: Bluetooth
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no


In this case, wireless is being disabled elsewhere (indicated by "Hard blocked: yes"). If it were soft blocked, rfkill unblock wifi should be enough to rectify the issue.

Next, sudo vim /var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state which should show the state of the file as so


[main]
NetworkingEnabled=true
WirelessEnabled=false
WWANEnabled=true


WirelessEnabled needs to be set to false, and the file saved.

At this stage, do not attempt to restart networking - it won't work, and will result in the file being revert to what it was pre-save.

Simply reboot the system (I did a full shutdown and power-up cycle) and wireless should be active again.