Why can't my Wifi connect or disconnect?

Wifi connection might drop spontaneously or simply cannot connect. Users on Ubuntu 10.04 and 11.04 have reported experiencing the problem.

Running dmesg would show:

[210749.637705] wlan0: deauthenticating from 00:23:89:48:3b:b0 by local choice (reason=3)
[210778.632244] wlan0: deauthenticating from 00:23:89:48:3b:b0 by local choice (reason=3)
[210784.456359] wlan0: deauthenticating from 00:23:89:82:75:70 by local choice (reason=3)

which is pretty cryptic.

I have tried: kill -9 wpa_supplicant, but wpa_supplicant keeps getting restarted each time.

Also, some have suggested that this was caused by enabling power management. However, this might not be true, as the problem has presented itself in a situation where power management was disabled.

Solution 1:

According to this bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/548992

The problem is larger than only Ubuntu but affects more Linux Distributions as well.

In the RedHat bug they suggest that it is most likely IPv6 which is causing the issue. If you are not using IPv6 on your WiFi network, change the setting in the network manager to IPv6 Ingore (Negeren in the Dutch version)

[when your network migrates to IPv6 you can turn this setting back on again http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6 ]

The RedHat bug is here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=590202

make sure that if you are having this issue to participate in the Ubuntu Bug by adding any extra information that is helpful, such as your findings on wpa-supplicant and by clicking the Affects Me button, the more people who report it the more priority it will get. Thank you for taking the time to make Ubuntu Better for all of us.