Showing posts with label radio frequency kill switch is on. Show all posts
Showing posts with label radio frequency kill switch is on. Show all posts

Sunday, August 12, 2012

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.