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I have a small Acer Revo PC with Ubuntu 14.10 that I'm configuring to run as a portable media center.

I'm trying to set it up as a WiFi access point so that I can control XBMC/Kodi with Android devices via an app. This works fine so far.

However, I'm having trouble with the WiFi being soft blocked by rfkill on every startup.

  • I tried unblocking it in /etc/rc.local (rfkill unblock wifi) but this doesn't work. Whatever is causing rfkill to block WiFi probably happens after rc.local is finished running.
  • If I SSH into the PC fast enough after a reboot, I can see that WiFi actually works for a couple of seconds and then gets blocked. I can see the network on my smartphone as well, but it disappears shortly after showing up.
  • I found the file that supposedly stores the rfkill state: /var/lib/rfkill/saved-state. Changing the line to phy0 0 or phy0 1 doesn't solve the problem. Also the file doesn't seem to change at all, so whatever stores the state doesn't work.
  • I tried removing the upstart scripts for rfkill (/etc/init/rfkill-[re]store) - no improvement.

What worked for me was the following line in rc.local:

sh -c "sleep 10 && rfkill unblock wifi" &

But this is a crappy workaround, I have to disable the AP and DHCP services from auto-starting and start them "manually" in rc.local after unblocking WiFi.

What causes rfkill to block things at startup? How do I disable this?

M3L
  • 181

3 Answers3

1

I was just having this problem and nmcli r wifi on solved it. NetworkManager was killing the wifi after startup finished which is why startup script solutions didn't work for me.

amo
  • 201
0

You have to blacklist the acer-wmi kernel module:

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

add blacklist acer_wmi as a new line at the bottom of this file.

then reboot.

Or if you like one-line:

echo blacklist acer-wmi | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-acer-wmi.conf

Other methods:

"Soft blocked" means "blocked by software". A faulty driver or other kernel module can lead to connectivity loss.

Some methods to get WiFi working are described on help.ubuntu.com/

There is also a Launchpad question on this issue: answers.launchpad.net

You can also try a specify device like

rfkill unblock bluetooth
Nishanth R
  • 155
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On my acer one blaclisting acer-wmi works but only after installation of firmware-b43-installer package. Dont't ask me why... I noticed it was missing trying to install debian before switching to lubuntu

Nicola
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