HP NC6120 Laptop Wiress Stopped Working

I have a HP NC6120 laptop for a few years. It is a bit long in the tooth but works perfectly well as a Web Browser Appliance. I have had a number of Linux distributions on it  and it is currently runing Arch Linux.

Anyway, someone, who shall remain nameless, spilled a glass of water on it. I removed the power and all the batteries and let it dry for a few days.

When I powered it up again, it started up perfectly, with no ill effects from it's recent accident.

The only thing was that the WiFi was no longer working.

There was a clue in the dmesg log. It said "radio frequency kill switch is on". What the feck did that mean?

I followed many bread crumb trails that led to dead ends.

I eventually came accross a reference to a program called 'rfkill'. I wired up the laptop and installed the rfkill package.

Running it, I got the following:

[root@daffy ~]# rfkill list
0: hp-wifi: Wireless LAN
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: yes
1: hp-bluetooth: Bluetooth
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no
2: phy0: Wireless LAN
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no
3: hci0: Bluetooth
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no

I simply ran 'rfkill unblock 0'



Running rfkill again, I got the following:

[root@daffy ~]# rfkill list
0: hp-wifi: Wireless LAN
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no

And the wireless worked again.

Woohoo! Time for a beer.