Re: A bit more on Bookworm and WiFi problens

The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

On 12/11/2024 17:54, druck wrote:

On 11/11/2024 22:20, bp@www.zefox.net wrote:

Apolgies for the mixup. I meant to report that the behavior of
the internal wifi seems to be affected by both use of wired ethernet
and use of usb wifi. The internal wifi connected spontaneously after
connecting either a wired ethernet cable or a usb-wifi dongle. Alas,
that behavior is not repeatable. In the present config the usb-wifi
dongle connects, I can't get the internal wifi to connect though
it does detect the access point.

 
That does sound like some of the Network Manager behaviour I've
experienced on a couple of Linux Mint laptops.
 

There does seem to be a large discrepancy between wlan0 and wlan1
signal strength: wlan1 reports 93-96%, internal wlan0 only 79%.
Prior to the recent upgrades (but still bookworm) wlan0 reporting
more than about 70% gave a decent connection.

 
The WiFi antenna on the motherboard is very small, as long as it's a
normal sized USB WiFi stuck and not one of the tiny nub ones, it's
antenna will be far bigger.
 
That's why I used dongles in the shed at the bottom of the garden for
years with the Pi 1 and then 2, as the signal strength was better than a
Pi 3 with built in WiFi, although the reliability of the dongles wasn't
great. Incidentally I'm now using my first Asus router as an Ethernet to
WiFi bridge, which connects to the house easily over 5GHz with it's
large triple antenna.
 

Did you start with a fresh Bookworm image?

Initialy, yes. It was customized on microSD,
moved to a USB hard disk using Raspberry Pi Imager.

 
So it's a vanilla install using NetWork Manager and not an upgrade from
Bullseye as I've been doing to retain the old well working DHCPCD and
WPA supplicant networking.
 

What have you installed since?

Nothing apart from supplied upgrades, but I am using wayland, which
has been described as troublesome.

 
It can be, but not usually to networking.
 

What other hardware is connected?

One powered hub, running the added usb-wifi dongle
(old Ralink RT5370) plus an old Dell keyboard and mouse..
>

Are you using an official power supply?

No, but the Pi5 reads 5.07 volts at the GPIO header.
>
As this saga plays out the USB-Wifi dongle seems to
work quite well. Maybe it's all down to the better
signal strength. Because the problem appeared shortly
after an OS upgrade I tended to blame that. Perhaps
I'm mistaken.

 
Normally on Pi's I'd be looking at a hardware issue to do with the power
supply and the amount of USB devices connected, but I think you are
right in this case, and it's Network Manager getting confused about what
interfaces are available.
 

Or perhaps what priority order  they are to be selected in.
 
Perhaps its insisting on Ethernet before it brings up wifi etc etc.

The system seems agnostic between wired and wireless networking.
From its initial setup internal WiFi was the only networking option.
It worked for some months and then got flaky about one day after an
OS update, but was still usable. Shortly after a subsequent update,
the problems seemed to go away. Following yet another update the WiFi
became unusable and I moved the host where it could be hard wired.
That also put it much closer to my access point, whereupon both WiFi
and wired networking functioned.

Since then I added the usb-wifi dongle and returned the host to its
former location. The internal WiFi has connected on isolated occasions,
but the WiFi dongle works reliably and reports much higher signal
strength than the internal WiFi.

Suspicion first fell on the OS because of the initial appearance and
correction of problems after OS upgrades. Then it shifted to interference
from neighboring APs, which have about doubled in number but mostly use
5 GHz while mine's on 2.4 GHz. At this point it's unclear what's going on.

For now I'll plan to use a WiFi dongle on the Pi5 and watch what happens.

Thanks to all who've followed this thread!

bob prohaska