[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#969319: Bug#969319: wifi cannot connect after combined suspend & gateway reboot

[Lyndon Brown]

this is driving me a little crazy today.

some hours ago i was in the middle of getting some stuff transferred
over an rsync connection, when suddenly the transfers stopped
progressing. the connection had gone bad.

so, since previously a solution seemed to be closing some programs, i
started closing things down and trying to reconnect (having turned the
wifi off temporarily via the gnome menu).

this time, no luck, i'd closed all my open programs and it still would
not connect. of course it could be a background task, but whatever the
case, i needed to reboot.

i rebooted, and unlike before, it just would not connect. it has taken
me ***2 whole damn hours*** of fiddling to get connected again.

i rebooted the laptop multiple times; i rebooted the gateway multiple
times; it just would not work. i tried moving myself a few feet away
from the router to ensure a strong signal. i told NM to forget the
connection and re-added it, multiple times. i tried using iwctl to
connect, but it just immediately reported failure on every attempt. i
tried forcing a change of MAC with macchanger, no difference.

my android smartphone connected fine when i fetched it and turned on
the wifi... i turned off the gateway to scan visible networks with the
smartphone to check that there wasn't a neighbour with the same router-
model SSID, nope.

so i pushed the reset button on the gateway, told NM to forget the
connection, and interestingly had absolutely no trouble at all
connecting this time.

i restored a backup of the gateway's config and it rebooted. i then
again had NM forget the connection and tried to re-add it, and it just
kept refusing, giving me an 'activation of network connection failed'
popup at the top of my screen. note, i'd been copying and pasting the
password, so i know that's not the issue, i even compared the password
in the NM connection config and that stored in the gateway (via a wired
connection from an old machine).

i switched the gateway wifi channel, no difference. i set the SSID to
un-hidden. finally, shortly after doing this, it suddenly connected
fine.

i switched it back to hidden, then i went and sat down with the laptop
to type this up, and after a minute or so, i notice the connection
suddenly disappear, and again it's refusing to connect.

interestingly it was yesterday that iwd was updated to v1.9; i'd left
the laptop sleeping overnight, and just rebooting earlier today (if i
recall correctly), so perhaps the 1.9 update has either introduced yet
another problem on top, or otherwise made things much worse.

since it's gone down again after switched back to hidden, i'll spend a
little more time experimenting...

so, rebooted, no difference. moved next to gateway, no difference.

logged back into gateway via wired connection of older machine, changed
wifi to non-hidden, saved, turned around and boom, it's suddenly got a
wifi connection.

turned back to the old machine, changed to hidden again, turned back to
laptop, saw the wifi icon change to the '...' reconnect one
temporarily, but if i recall now correctly it remained up, i then
turned off and back on the wifi (on the laptop) and fails to connect.
switched back to unhidden, and connects perfectly. so yeah,
functionality for connecting to hidden networks is completely broken.

so i switched things back to wpa_supplicant and rebooted. straight
away, no issues at all connecting to the hidden SSID (after forgetting
and re-adding again of course). i'm connected now and getting work done
again.

well, it's almost working perfectly back on wpasupplicant, i was back
getting data transferred via rsync, and then eventually something went
wrong preventing further transfer, but turning the wifi off and back on
again fixed it. i recall that always being a bad as things had gotten
previously with wpasupplicant.