Intel(R) Centrino(R) Advanced-N 6230 & S9 issues

[PeterjmTim]

Hi all. I installed Sabayon 9 64-bit edition with GNOME the other day. Everything in this fantastic distro works fine, except for my wireless networking card. It is an Intel(R) Centrino(R) Advanced-N 6230, the machine is a Sony Vaio VPCSE series.

Funny thing is, when I connect to my WPA-protected network through the applet in the task bar, it says that I am connected to my network after I entered the passphrase. However, in my webbrowser I cannot connect to any website. When I open a terminal window, I cannot even ping my own router (192.168.0.1), let alone an outside website. When I reboot into Windows, everything is working fine.

Any ideas? I would hate having to choose another distro because of this issue, because Sabayon is truely one hell of a fine distribution...

[Fitzcarraldo]

Try installing the firmware package net-wireless/iwl6030-ucode and rebooting.

[PeterjmTim]

Try installing the firmware package net-wireless/iwl6030-ucode and rebooting.

Hi Fitzcarraldo,

thank you for your reply. I doubt whether this is the solution (as my network card is recognised and it can even see my network, however no internet), but I am willing to give it a try. No my next question: where can I find that package? I tried rigo, equo from the command line but it does not seem available. Even a google search didn't help me.

Thanks in advance for your answer!

P.S.: Funny thing is I have exactly the same problem on Linux Mint, Linux Mint Debian edition and Mageia. However, in Fedora 17 it works out of the box... Where is the world going to when Fedora is the best in hardware support

[Fitzcarraldo]

Well, you need the microcode (firmware) for your model of wireless controller. If you don't already have it installed, your wireless controller won't work. As you don't believe me, see the firmware table in: http://de.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Iwlwifi

Seems iwl6030-ucode is not in the Entropy repository. You could request it by filing a bug report (see the link at the top of this page) but it could take some time to get it added, so install it using Portage instead. As root user in a Terminal window:

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equo install git
emerge --sync
layman -S
layman -a sabayon-distro
layman -a sabayon
layman -S
emerge -1v iwl6030-ucode
equo rescue spmsync

[PeterjmTim]

Thanks Fitzcarraldo. I issued the commands you showed me, it went without a problem. I rebooted my machine, and connected to my wireless network. This went ok after entering my WPA passphrase. However, the problem is still the same: I cannot get on any website...

[Fitzcarraldo]

Now that you have the firmware installed for your wireless controller, you need to investigate each possible cause of lack of connectivity and rule it out.

The very first thing to do is to find out if you can establish a connection to the Internet without encryption enabled. To do that, temporarily disable all encryption on your home router via its browser interface, use the GNOME network GUI front-end (nm-applet) to disable the use of encryption, and try to establish a connection.

Also, you need to provide some detailed information and look in the log files to see if there are any error messages. As root user, run the following commands and paste the output in this thread:

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uname -a
lspci
lsusb
lsmod
ifconfig
iwconfig
rc-status
equo search networkmanager
cat /var/log/messages | grep 'Aug 24' | grep -E -i --text 'error|network'
dmesg | grep -E -i 'error|intel|wireless|firmware'
equo install rfkill
rfkill list
iwlist wlan0 scanning # Replace wlan0 with your interface, if different

Some other things to try:

1. Are you using Firefox? If you are, try disabling IPv6 in Firefox even if you have disabled it in the OS:

about:config

Change network.dns.disableIPv6 to true

I don't use Chrome/Chromium but I believe the method for disabling ipv6 in that is along the following lines:

about:net-internals

Click on DNS tab

Click on Disable IPV6

2. Check the MTU to make sure you are not getting fragmented packets:

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# ping -M do -s <packet size in bytes> www.cisco.com

E.g.

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# ping -M do -s 1472 www.cisco.com

Vary the packet size in the ping command until “Frag needed and DF set” is not displayed. MTU = (max packet size that does not fragment + 28 bytes). E.g. if maximum packet size without fragmentation is 1464, then MTU should be set as 1492.

You can then set the MTU to the required value (which will stick until the next reboot) as follows:

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# ifconfig wlan0 mtu <mtu>

There are a couple of ways to make it stick over reboots, but the easiest is probably to put the command in a new file /etc/local.d/01network.start and make it executable:

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# chmod +x /etc/local.d/01network.start

3. Uncomment the line "alias net-pf-10 off # IPv6" in the file /etc/modprobe.d/aliases.conf, then enter the following command as root user and reboot:

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update-modules

You can check if the ipv6 module is loaded or not by using the command:

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lsmod | grep ipv6

4. Have you got your hostname set up correctly? See the SL Wiki article 'HOWTO: Changing the hostname' for details. For information, here is my /etc/hosts file for you to compare with yours:

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# /etc/hosts: Local Host Database
#
# This file describes a number of aliases-to-address mappings for the for
# local hosts that share this file.
#
# In the presence of the domain name service or NIS, this file may not be
# consulted at all; see /etc/host.conf for the resolution order.
#

# IPv4 and IPv6 localhost aliases
127.0.0.1       meshedgedx      localhost.localdomain   localhost       meshedgedx.localdomain
::1     meshedgedx      localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6

("meshedgedx" is the hostname I chose for my main laptop; you will no doubt choose a different hostname.)

I don't have ipv6 disabled as I don't have any problems with it (some routers do), but another thing you could try is commenting out the line beginning with "::1" in your /etc/hosts file, to see if there is an effect.

5. One of my laptops is dog-slow on a wireless network unless the WPA encryption protocol is set to be only WPA-TKIP. That laptop even has a problem if my wireless router is configured to support WPA+WPA2, which should simultaneously be able to handle machines using WPA and machines using WPA2. So I had to configure my router to use WPA only, not WPA2 or WPA+WPA2. So, if your router is configured for WPA2 or WPA+WPA2, try changing your encryption to just WPA.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Also, in addition to the above, I notice that iwl6030-ucode is mentioned in the Portage ebuild for sys-kernel/linux-firmware, so you could also try uninstalling the iwl6030-ucode package and installing the linux-firmware package, as the latter may possibly contain the firmware file for your wireless controller. I don't know if the Entropy package for linux-firmware pulls in all the different firmware packages that it could, though (it can be controlled individually in Portage), but it's worth a try.

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equo remove iwl6030-ucode
equo install linux-firmware
equo conf update

Before and after doing the above, have a look in the directory /lib/firmware/ to see if one or more files iwlwifi-6030*.ucode exist:

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ls -la /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-60*

EDIT (August 24, 2012): Forget the text above in this particular post. I've just had a look at the savedconfig file created by the linux-firmware package merged with USE="savedconfig" (/etc/portage/savedconfig/sys-kernel/linux-firmware-20120719), and it does not include iwlwifi-6030*.ucode files in the list. Furthermore, the directory /lib/firmware/ does not contain any iwlwifi-6030*.ucode files after merging linux-firmware with USE="savedconfig". So it appears one does still need to install the Portage package sys-firmware/iwl6030-ucode. In other words, my original post remains correct.

EDIT2 (August 25, 2012): Gaahh... scratch my first edit above to this post! I have been doing some more digging. I looked in the ebuilds for the iwl6030-ucode package: the ebuild iwl6030-ucode-18.168.6.1.ebuild installs iwlwifi-6000g2b-6.ucode in /lib/firmware/, and the ebuild iwl6030-ucode-17.168.5.2.ebuild installs iwlwifi-6000g2b-5.ucode in /lib/firmware/. There are no iwlwifi-6030*.ucode files. So it does look like it would also be OK to install the Portage package linux-firmware instead of the Portage package iwl6030-ucode for the Intel 6230 wireless controller. I assume that the Entropy package linux-firmware built with USE="-savedconfig" installs both iwlwifi-6000g2b-5.ucode and iwlwifi-6000g2b-6.ucode. That would be easy enough to check by looking in /lib/firmware/ after installing the linux-firmware package via Entropy. Also, the output of the dmesg command I posted earlier would quickly indicate whether or not the correct firmware file is installed.