I've searched for hours and tried multiple suggestions to no avail, except for
editing iwlwifi.conf and adding the "extra options", I'm not sure doing that part applies to my setup or not.
OK, here's what I have:
result of lspci -v:
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Centrino Wireless-N 2230 (rev c4)
Subsystem: Intel Corporation Centrino Wireless-N 2230 BGN
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 45
Memory at 50500000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
Capabilities: <access denied>
Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi
result of sudo lshw -C network:
*-network DISABLED
description: Wireless interface
product: Centrino Wireless-N 2230
vendor: Intel Corporation
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0
logical name: wlan0
version: c4
serial: 68:5d:43:d6:e2:9b
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=iwlwifi driverversion=3.16.3-031603-generic firmware=18.168.6.1 latency=0 link=no multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn
resources: irq:45 memory:50500000-50501fff
result of rfkill list all:
0: phy0: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: yes
and rfkill unblock all seems to do nothing.
Update: booting into Windows and enabling it there does the trick but this doesn't seem like a permanent solution for the underlying cause.