Networking disabled after upgrade to 10.10 beta

[Chris]

Binary package hint: network-manager

I upgraded to the 10.10 beta on my Lenovo X200 laptop. After the rebooting as part of the upgrade, the networking no longer works. Both wired and wireless are non-functional.

The networking icon in the upper right is the wireless symbol, grayed-out (not lit up white), with a red exlamation point. Left clicking on the icon shows a menu with a single grayed-out item "Networking disabled", which cannot be clicked. Right clicking on the icon shows that "Enable Networking" and "Connection information" are grayed out. "Enable Notifications", "Edit Connections..." and "About" are clickable.

dmesg shows a line from NetworkManger that looks relevant:

  NetworkManger[1175]: <info> Networking is disabled by state file

That led me to grep around in /var and found the the file /var/NetworkManager/NetworkManger.state, with the following contents:

  [main]
  NetworkingEnabled=false
  WirelessEnabled=true
  WWANEnabled=true

Sure enough, changing NetowrkingEnabled to "true" and rebooting fixed the problem.

Here is what I think happened. During the upgrade, after all of the packages had been downloaded and installation was well underway, the laptop lost its wireless connection for some reason, and kept prompting for the password to reconnect (even though it already knows the password...but I have seen NetworkManager do that before, so perhaps that is another bug). I used the networking icon to disable networking.

Apparently the enable/disable networking menu items are broken in the new NetworkManager. Even after fixing it manually in the NetworkManger.state file and rebooting with working wireless, the NetworkManager's right-click menu has two grayed out unclickable items:

  Enable Networking
  Enable Wireless

Since networking and wireless ARE enabled, those should really be white, clickable, and say "Disable" rather than "Enable". Looks like a regression from 10.04.

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

Wow, that looks to me like a nice case of really bad luck during an upgrade.

So yes, state file and enable/disable behavior has changed between 0.8 and 0.8.1 as shipped now in Maverick -- basically to make it more robust and split enabling/disabling from the cases where a system has wifi enabled and suspends (or fails to)... then we obviously want to set it back to enabled. With the change though it won't set it back to enabled during upgrade, which is something we might want to look into.

If you completely remove the /var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state file and reboot, does it fix the issue, and allow the Enable* options to be back to a sensitive (non-greyed-out) state?

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

Marking as a duplicate of 637930. It seems to be the same issue and contains a little more info.