Tag Archives: wifi

How to run an ethernet cable in your home, and save your relationship

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My partner and I live in a 2-bedroom flat with our very young daughter. After a couple of weeks of working from the living room, which is where the WiFi is, and where I typically keep my computer, I decided, for the good of our relationship, to move my office to the spare bedroom.

There’s just one problem:

I can connect to the Wifi, but performance is abysmal

I’m not alone in spending a lot more time working from home recently, and if my Slack calls at work are anything to go by, I’m also not alone in struggling with poor WiFi reception. Urban areas tend to be densely packed with WiFi signals at the best of times, let alone while everyone’s cooped up at home full-time.

In my case, the WiFi connection in the spare bedroom is totally unusable for work, but continuing to work from the lounge would risk my relationship (and possibly my general safety).

So what’s a self-isolating telecommuter to do?

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Intel wifi led blinking AGAIN on Ubuntu 12.04

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I previously posted about this on previous versions of Ubuntu, but despite updating the instructions for 11.10 the instructions are once again obsolete. It seems Intel changes the name of its wifi kernel module every release…

On my Dell E4300 with “Intel Corporation WiFi Link 5100” (as reported by lspci), the module name is now “iwlwifi”. This means the kernel options you add to /etc/modprobe.d should be against this module rather than iwlcore (11.04) or iwlagn (11.10).

So the instructions once again:

$ sudo -i
# echo 'options iwlwifi led_mode=1' >> /etc/modprobe.d/wlan.conf
# modprobe -r iwlwifi && modprobe iwlwifi

Bear in mind that the second line removes the wifi kernel module temporarily which will disconnect your wifi. It should automatically reconnect, if not reboot.

Stopping the Intel WiFi LED from blinking in Ubuntu

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My Dell E4300 has an Intel 5100 wifi card and the led blinks constantly. I still don’t understand how Intel can consider blinking the wifi LED during data transfer to be a sensible default. For most people it blinks non-stop which is both uninformative and irritating.

Fortunately blogger Alex Cabal found a solution for Karmic, and his updated solution also works for Natty/11.04. It describes opening a text editor and pasting a couple of lines, however I’m much lazier so here’s the one-line version:

echo 'options iwlcore led_mode=1' >> /etc/modprobe.d/wlan.conf

Of course, the command above must be run as root (sudo -i), for some reason sudo gave me access denied. You also need to reboot… or you could just unload and reload the module:

modprobe -r iwlagn && modprobe iwlagn

The double ampersand just executes the next command if the previous one succeeded (exit status 0).

Update

As of Ubuntu 11.10 (kernel 3.0.0) the option has to be applied to the iwlagn module, options for iwlcore are ignored. Thus the full solution now becomes:

sudo -i
echo 'options iwlagn led_mode=1' >> /etc/modprobe.d/wlan.conf
modprobe -r iwlagn && modprobe iwlagn