I have two Lenovo R500 Laptops with 4GB RAM and 64GB SSD drives. Both of them have the latest stable MX Linux installed and both of them had WiFi working without a problem, did all of the updates, did some web browsing, etc. Both laptops have the same hard wired on/off switch in the front and both of them also have an FN Keyboard shortcut to enable/disable WiFi. On the first of these two laptops the WiFi still works fine right now.

On the second identical laptop the WiFi inexplicably just stopped working. When I open a web browser to pages which I know to be working, I receive error messages that a connection could not be established.

The WiFi hardware light (not desktop symbol) on the laptop continues to work. The WiFi hardware switch continues to enable/disable the WiFi connectivity (message on the screen tells me so). The FN Key combination on the keyboard also works, to disable/enable WiFi. If I left-click on the network/wifi desktop symbol, I can see a list of all available nearby WiFi connections. I can also enable/disable connectinos from there. If I right-click on the desktop network/wifi symbol I can enable/disable the type of conenctivity (LAN, WiFi) and I can also view information on the current connection. If I check the information, I can see that I'm connected at 67% connectivity which is actually pretty darn fast since our router has wifi G/N/AC working.

For all intents and purposes, based on everything that I can see, the WiFi should actually be working, but still the web-browser pages won't load. Network Manager is version 4.4
I'm at a complete loss ...

EDIT: The problem is actually worse than I thought. Tried a separate Ralink 802.11n adapter which works on all of my Linux machines without fail. The adapter is recognized, the adapter shows the same available connections as the built-in Intel adapter, and the Ralink can be enabled/disabled as well as have recognized connections assigned to it. Yet the Ralink adapter won't work either!

Alright, last test ... brought the laptop over to the router, connected a LAN cable directly. Sure enough, the WiFi disables itself which is perfectly normal, and immediately recognizes and connects with the LAN connection. The desktop symbols are switching and doing everything that they're supposed to be doing. Bummer, not even the connection via LAN is working. I simply can't get an internet connection going, even though everything that I can see on the computer tells me that everything "should" indeed be working. This is nuts ...

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There is nothing in the tests you have done that establishes any certain WIFI failure. This could be something as simple as a nameserver failure.
Have you checked the /etc/resolv.conf on the two laptops for differences?
Have you attempted to ping or connect to any sites by IP address instead of using the FQDN (name)?
On WIFI, can you ping the address of your WIFI access point?
Have you checked your routing tables when WIFI is on and compared the two laptops?

That, for me, would be a start. Let us know what you find.

Well, in all fairness, like most computer users including many if not most professional users I know next to nothing about the inner workings of individual network managers. I have three additional images here which let me see that both identical systems do have one difference. Both of them show the installed LAN & WiFi hardware adapters which are identical. Both of the laptops recognize the connections. But for some odd reason, one of them does not have the installed adapter I.P. number showing. That's the only difference that I could find and I understand that without recognition of the I.P. that particular laptop can't have a working network connection.

I don't have time to work myself through such issues pretty much blindly without step by step advice, the kind of advice that people who know absolutely nothing about network adapters require.

So I went ahead and installed Windows 10 Professional on both of these laptops and that worked without a hitch. Downloads, Updates, etc. everything is working fine. The thread will remain open as unresolved. Thanks anyway. Have a great day.

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Perhaps it got 'soft blocked', I'm using a HP-G62 laptop that used to work well with wifi on MX & AntiX, (& most other Linux & BSDs), but for some reason it now gets 'soft blocked' on start up & I have to unblock it before I can get a connection.

so hardware is identical
the storage capacity has nothing to do with problem
one has network problems, the other doesn't
substituting hardware ( and thus drivers ) does not resolve
wired has same issue as wifi

this points to software / configuration

web sites do not work
ok, so lets rule out dns problem

does that work?
does that work?

Thank you, fatrat and Firerat.
Tried both of your suggestions, here's what I got in return ...

Using the sudo rfkill command I received 6 relevant lines which showed me the devices 0, 1, and 4 ... listed respectively as Bluetooth, Wireless LAN, and Bluetooth again. Each listed device had 2 lines subscribed to it, one line with soft block no to all and another line with hard block no to all. In summary, all six lines for all 3 devices came back with soft block / hard block ... no to all.

I have absolutely no idea what this means, but that's what I got back.
Tried using a b rowser after the command, still no joy even though a connection seems to exist.

Then I tried the ping commands.
The result of the first one was ... Name of Service unknown or not found

The second ping command came back with several lines of results.
64 bytes from blah blah blah
64 bytes from blah blah blah
64 bytes from blah blah blah
Ping Statistics
3 packets transmitted, 3 packets received
0 packet loss, time 2002ms

Tried using a browser again, figuring that that won't work ... and it didn't.
Figuring perhaps a restart might correct things, so I tried that ... made no difference.

I've repeatedly had issues in the past with VPN as well as printer hardware configurations by not using systemd during start which happens to be the default for MX Linux. So I went ahead and changed the grub settings to default start with systemd, restarted the machine, yet still no change in connectivity. I also tried 3 different installed browsers (Firefox, Chromium, Vivaldi) with pages failing on all three of them.

Last but not least, I tried using a wifi adapter which always works on any Linux machine that I've tried it on. True and tested on numerous Linux distros during the past 3 years, including MX Linux. Well, the adapter was recognized by the system without a problem. I could switch the built-in adapter off with a click, followed by enabling the external adapter with a click. I was able to choose and activate both available wifi connections ... still no working Internet.

I'm a total know nothing noob as far as network settings are concerned. What really puzzles me is the fact that the MX Linux update manager still looks for and finds updates to be installed, but trying to install them yields error messages due to not being able to retrieve the update files from the update servers. It's as if the laptop is constipated ... stuff is obviously trying to get in and out ... but it just can't make it, due to some inexplicable blockage.

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your internet is fine ( ping using IP worked )
you can not resolve from DNS ( ping using url failed to get IP )

assuming that give you something ( other than No such file or directory )
need the output of both those

I booted up the system with and without systemd, used the provided commands on each, but for some reason the output was identical each time. Anyhow, here's what I got ...

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The Fritzbox 7490 is our router here in Germany. It's considered as one of the best and the router functions perfectly. We have 6 dedicated LAN lines for our personal computers throughout the house as well as a TV Box. We also have two seperate WiFi connections for my computer repair work and for a guest account, which both have always worked perfectly to this day. Matter of fact, I'm using the guest account right now for responding on this forum while my wife is in the same room on her dedicated LAN line. All of our machines run MX Linux or Linux Mint while most customer machines have Windows 10 installed.

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Hi,

I've recently had something very similar with two identical laptops running Mint 19.2. The wifi "failed" on one of them in a similar way to what you are describing.
All tests and logs showed that everything was working, apart from no connectivity.

Wifi started working when I disabled bluetooth. I then uninstalled and reinstalled everything bluetooth related. Everything is now working normally.

Weird!

I'm not saying that is is your problem... but it might be worth disabling bluetooth to see if this affects anything.

Bodge99

Thanks. Disabling bluetooth did not work. I tried rebooting afterwards too, but that also did not make an improvement. I did not remove/uninstall anything bluetooth related because I know that Synaptic would show me much more than just the bluetooth related files ... which I don't want to start removing in order to avoid removing something important that's actually unrelated to bluetooth.

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It appears that networking is just fine, but the "systemd-resolved" is not populating your resolv.conf correctly (or at all).

I would check the config file for that wifi interface, and the config file for systemd-resolve.

You can configure nameservers in /etc/systemd/resolved.conf, and that might be best.

I found this documentation online about adjusting the /etc/systemd/resolved.conf file You may be able to detect the locall CORRECT settings by comparing the /etc/resolv.conf files on the two devices and replicate the DNS from the one that is workign into the /etc/systemd/resolv.confd file in settings like those shown above.

did you try the bold?
what did that output?

Every time when I try that command, I receive about 46 lines of text which end with something to the effect of ... LINE SO AND SO END ... which is highlighted. Copying this text into leafpad or mousepad makes it look like a bunch of YYYYYY because the code page type is wrong. I have no freakin' idea why that didn't happen with the other commands that I copied into mousepad. I tried this 3 different times. Every time the text looks fine in mousepad, but as soon as I save it and bring it over to the machine where I'm writing now, the code page has changed and only gobblygook appears on the page.

I did this a fourth time and took two screenshotsa of the output. But those won't fit here because of the ridiculous 256KB image size limit (what are these, the 90s with tiny disk drives) ??? I can't believe that images have to be that darn small. I'll be back with the modifications shortly ...

@wpeckham

That's a good idea, I'll check that out later or tomorrow. Are you saying that first line under [Resolve] should be used as a command the way that it is written in your response? Thanks.

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will write it to a file

we should be able to deal with the encoding

or you could upload the "mousepad" one you have. it must have .txt extension ( to be uploaded )

Thanks everyone, but I'm out of time for today. I've never seen anything like this weird coding error before. It's not just doing it on the text files either. When I took the screenshots it turns out that the first screenshot turned into gobblygook while the second one turned out fine. Tried this with both png as well as jpg images and exactly the same thing happened ... just on this computer that I'm posting on. On the problem machine the images look fine. So I went ahead and reworked both images with gimp, resaving them and renaming them to something else. Looked great on the problem machine ... while image 1 turned to gobblygook again as soon as I transferred it over to a brand new formatted NTFS stick.

Part of the problem as far as the text is concerned, has to do with the terminal output itself. For some strange reason, once the systemd-resolve --status command has completed, the terminal becomes completely useless to me thereafter. Can't add input, escape, exit, or anything else. I'm stuck with that terminal as is ... until I just "x" out of it at the top of the window.

Right now I'm partitioning the stick into ext 4 and ntfs. Will try to work with that tomorrow morning since gparted is going to be busy for the next few hours anyway. I've been working professionalyl with computers since 1991 and got certified in 1994, but this is weirdness that I've never seen before. I'll be back in the morning. Gotta take the dog out now ...

My wife is walking the dog ... Like Arnold says, I'll be back.

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