Ubuntu 11.10’s WiFi crashes my router

No seriously, it does. Whenever it makes a connection to the router it causes it to enter some bad state wherein it refuses to allow any connections to occur. This also has the effect of booting all other machines from the network. Apparently I’m not the only one to have this problem either.

I did manage to find a bit of a work around though:

  1. Set your wireless router to Mixed B/G mode only (yes I know, you lose out on N by doing this…)
  2. Enter the following into a terminal:
    echo "options iwlagn 11n_disable=1" | tee /etc/modprobe.d/iwlagn.confg
    sudo modprobe -rf iwlagn
    sudo modprobe -v iwlagn
    sudo service network-manager restart
  3. Maybe reboot?

I’ve also heard of some people getting it to work by enabling this instead of disabling it. To do so simply change the 11n_disable=1 line above to 11n_disable=0.

Hopefully they will have this annoying bug fixed soon.



9 Comments

  1. Hi,

    I’ve encountered the same problem (Intel N 1030 wireless card and TPLINK 1043ND router). As per my investigation, it seems that problem is related with the iwlagn driver, being a part of 3.0.0-12 kernel. Driver had bug related with the subframes aggregation (patch for this bug could be found here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=519535&action=diff).

    In my case, the solution for Ubuntu 11.10 was to install kernel 3.1-RC from the MainlineBuilds. Do the following:

    1. Download kernel packages from http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.1-rc10-oneiric/ for your architecture.
    2. Install them using dpkg -i *.deb
    3. Reboot the Ubuntu with recently installed kernel.

    My N 1030 card works really fine now, without disabling the N.

    Hope this helps.

  2. Thank you for the fix you posted, bart! My notebook’s wireless is working once again without killing my entire network.

  3. Is this something that is going to be put into an official patch sometime soon? I just disabled wireless N on my router, but it would be nice if I didn’t have to do that or do any other system stuff!

  4. I see the same problem with both ubuntu 10.04 and Mint 11.. resetting the router seems to clear things up, but until you do, everything connected to the wireless router (linksys in this case) looses connection. This includes my Sirius WiFi radio.

  5. I solve the problem doing the following steps:
    1) Go to the applet Edit Connections
    2) Edit the wireless connection whit the problem
    3) Go to IPV4 Settings tab
    4) Change to Automatic (DHCP) addresses Only
    5) Write the following DNS Addresses: 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4 (Google public DNS servers)
    6) Save the settings, and restart your wireless router
    I hope this helps

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