20.10 Server WiFi drops connection frequently

Solution 1:

"beacon loss" reports crop up here after more intel wifi card owners upgraded to a >=5.1 kernel. The important log lines are:

wpa_supplicant: wlp0s20f3: CTRL-EVENT-BEACON-LOSS
wpa_supplicant: wlp0s20f3: CTRL-EVENT-DISCONNECTED bssid=.. reason=4 locally_generated=1

The gist: iwlwifi since kernel 5.1 is more strict in disconnecting when a constant number of beacons were unseen. While there can different reasons for the loss itself (access points settings / spectrum environment / bugs), the current value is too disruptive from a user perspective if a stable connection has priority over optimal performance or power saving features.

You can read up on it in bugid #203709. A workaround patch was proposed in January to make the constant a runtime parameter outside kernel builds. If you want to give this a go (it's modifying 4 files and ~2h for the compile on a Laptop), follow the BuildYourOwnKernel docs and then set module params at boot or write to /sys/module/iwlwifi/parameters/beacon_timeout and keep a watch on this until a solution is merged.