NM status icon sometimes not clickable

[Marius B. Kotsbak]

Sometimes lately after upgrade to Natty the network manager status icon is not possible to click on, nothing happens. When it happened now, it seems to be solved by restarting network-manager service ("sudo service network-manager restart").

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: network-manager-gnome 0.8.4~git.20110318t152954.9c4c9a0-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-9.43-generic 2.6.38.4
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-9-generic i686
Architecture: i386
CRDA: Error: [Errno 2] Ingen slik fil eller filkatalog
Date: Mon May 9 09:09:42 2011
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Release i386 (20101007)
IpRoute:
 192.168.1.0/24 dev wlan0 proto kernel scope link src 192.168.1.130 metric 2
 169.254.0.0/16 dev wlan0 scope link metric 1000
 default via 192.168.1.1 dev wlan0 proto static
Keyfiles: Error: [Errno 2] Ingen slik fil eller filkatalog
NetworkManager.state:
 [main]
 NetworkingEnabled=true
 WirelessEnabled=true
 WWANEnabled=true
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=nb_NO:en
 LANG=nb_NO.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: network-manager-applet
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to natty on 2011-04-24 (15 days ago)

[BobC (flymypg)]

"Me Too": Differences in my case:

1. Applet drop-down menu appears, but clicking on any items does nothing, including the "Connection information" and "Edit Connections" entries.

2. Restarting network manager did nothing but drop the network. With the dead menu, a system reboot was required to regain network functionality.

[Rudolf Klusal (klusik)]

Yes, same here.

If I need to click on NM applet icon, I must click on calendar, then with opened dropdown menu go to left and so on. If it is open once, it works, but it is still not clickable -- NM applet, Battery applet, BT applet, Keyboard swtitcher applet, sound applet -- everything is not clickable, except for Calendar. So I go to the nm via calendar, no problem :-) I hope somebody will repair it soon ;)

[Marius B. Kotsbak (mariusko)]

It is a long time since I last saw this., so it might be fixed in some of the updates.

[[e-mail] (hk-kapper)]

well, I've been still affected just yesterday... (2011-07-06)

regards
harald kapper

[Vadim Peretokin (vperetokin)]

It's not fixed, it affects me daily.

[yannack (yannack)]

Not fixed for me, the problem has just happened, with my system up to date.

[Leonid Evdokimov (darkk)]

Yes, I see exactly same behavior as in Bug #702551 - VPN Connections submenu is gone and clicking any menu item does not produce any result.

Workaround, suggested by ralf-hildebrandt@ really works:

$ killall nm-applet && nm-applet

Beware, killing nm-applet will also kill runing VPN service and you'll have to restart it.

[[e-mail] (hk-kapper)]

hi
the behaviour can be reproduced here specifically after a system sleep/standby I most certainly have to kill and restart nm-applet.

regards
hk

[Ralf Hildebrandt (ralf-hildebrandt)]

* <email address hidden> <email address hidden>:
> hi
> the behaviour can be reproduced here specifically after a system sleep/standby I most certainly have to kill and restart nm-applet.

Oh yes, it never occured to me that this could be the reason - I'm
using suspend extensively.

--
Ralf Hildebrandt
  Geschäftsbereich IT | Abteilung Netzwerk
  Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin
  Campus Benjamin Franklin
  Hindenburgdamm 30 | D-12203 Berlin
  Tel. [phone] | Fax: [phone]
  <email address hidden> | http://www.charite.de

[Vadim Peretokin (vperetokin)]

Same.

[Martin Spacek (mspacek)]

I suspect this is a duplicate of bug #780602, which seems to have more activity. Should we mark this one as a duplicate?

[Leonid Evdokimov (darkk)]

I think, that memory leak and functionality loss are two different bugs.

I doubt that memory leak leads to malfunctioning nm-applet, on the other hand, it may be related and I'll chech RSS/VSZ size next time I'll see the issue.

[Marius B. Kotsbak (mariusko)]

That bug describes it as it is possible to open the menu, but not working. But if anyone experience this again (it seems to have disappeared for me), you could look in "top" and see if the nm-applet consumes much memory.

[Leonid Evdokimov (darkk)]

Failed again.

Before restart:
  PID STARTED TIME RSS VSZ COMMAND
 1342 Aug 06 00:01:31 75784 482772 nm-applet --sm-disable

After killall workaround:
  PID STARTED TIME RSS VSZ COMMAND
 4847 11:29:51 00:00:00 17060 397680 nm-applet --sm-disable

After an hour of run-time:
 4847 11:29:51 00:00:04 23108 501252 nm-applet --sm-disable

[Pavel Bykov (slidersv)]

Me too on 11.04.
I have reinstalled network manager, but that didn't help.
Nearly every time I suspend, the wired connection does not go up.
Removing/initiating e1000e module (for the network adapter) does nothing, so the problem has nothing to do with the HW.

Interesting note: my wireless adapter has an "Auto" profile, and that connects without a problem.

Clicking on drop-down menu items ( including on "Edit connections..." ) does not work. (same symptom as the others).

Workaround I use is:

kill `ps aux | awk '/nm-applet/ {print $2}'`
nm-applet &

(basically restarting nm-applet by killing it and then launching it into background)

[Julius Baxter (juliusbaxter)]

On 11.04, uptime of 6 days I am seeing over 1GB of RAM used for nm-applet.

1205300 nm-applet --sm-disable

output of pmap:
http://paste.ubuntu.com/692911/

[phil (fongpwf)]

Is this bug really a duplicate of the memory leak bug 780602?
After nine days of uptime on 11.04:
ps aux | grep nm-applet
fongpwf 1661 0.1 23.2 723964 461996 ? SLl Dec06 16:47 nm-applet --sm-disable

It's using more than 450MB of resident memory!

[JKL (jkl102001)]

> Is this bug really a duplicate of the memory leak bug 780602

I have observed the unresponsiveness problem even when memory use wasn't particularly high. To me that means the memory leak and unresponsiveness problems are unrelated.

> After nine days of uptime on 11.04:

As far as I know, the memory leak patches from 780602 have not been backported to 11.04.

[Kristian Larsson (plajjan)]

Just thought I'd chime in and say that I've seen this bug on 11.04, 11.10 as well as now on 12.04. I am using VPN rather extensively and thus notice it quite often. VPN menu simply goes empty.

Where do I start troubleshooting?

[xsoul (ivyleexyg)]

bug still exists on 12.04. Very annoying for frequent VPN user like me. Pls fix this asap.

[Marius B. Kotsbak (mariusko)]

Is there anything special you do before it happens? I haven't seen it in a long time. You could look in the syslog/dmesg and see of there are any hints there when it happens.

[Michael Zeltner (mzeltner)]

12.04 here, still affects me too.

I don't see *any* system messages whatsoever, the menu simply stops reacting to clicks, also does not show VPN accounts.

NM is otherwise stable with connections it's currently connected to or connects automatically. It shows the connection strength of WiFi connections accurately as well.

I didn't recognise special things happening before it stops working, although it happens more often after my machine was in sleep mode. Killing and starting nm-applet alleviates the problem, but you know, turning it off and on again seems like an old-school way of fixing things ...

[Marius B. Kotsbak (mariusko)]

If you want to debug it more, you could try starting nm-applet from a terminal window and see if there are any output there when it stops working.

The problem could be in network-manager if a call to it hangs, but nm-applet should have been able to handle that.

[Kristian Larsson (plajjan)]

On 08/23/2012 09:57 AM, Marius Kotsbak wrote:
> If you want to debug it more, you could try starting nm-applet from a
> terminal window and see if there are any output there when it stops
> working.
>
> The problem could be in network-manager if a call to it hangs, but nm-
> applet should have been able to handle that.
>
> ** Tags added: precise
>
I've been trying every now and then to run nm-applet interactively, but
I always seem to miss the event when the icon goes missing... until
today. I had it running in a terminal and the VPN just disappeared from
the list. Unfortunately though, there's not much to go on, this is what
it said in the terminal:

kll@lingloi320 ~ $ pkill nm-applet && nm-applet
** Message: applet now removed from the notification area

(nm-applet:13513): GdkPixbuf-CRITICAL **: gdk_pixbuf_composite:
assertion `dest_y >= 0 && dest_y + dest_height <= dest->height' failed
** Message: No keyring secrets found for kllonken
1/802-11-wireless-security; asking user.

^C** Message: PID 0 (we are 13513) sent signal 2, shutting down...

I killed it with ctrl+c and restarted it. I'm not even sure the
GdkPixbuf-CRITICAL error messaged showed up now or i it was previous to
this (my laptop has an uptime of a few days). Is there a way to increase
verbosity or otherwise access more debug data?

Kind regards,
     Kristian.

[Marius B. Kotsbak (mariusko)]

Don't think so. You might try upgrading to Ubuntu 12.10 beta.

[Ralph Meijer (ralphmeijer)]

@mariusko: I upgraded a couple of days ago, but unfortunately this problem persists in 12.10.

[Marius B. Kotsbak (mariusko)]

Strange that I who originally reported this bug has never seen it recently. I'm suspecting it has something to do with the hardware/modems/VPN or other usage. Ralph/Kristian: which hardware/features do you use with nm-applet?

[Ralf Hildebrandt (ralf-hildebrandt)]

Mostly WLAN.

[David Morfin (j-launchpad-sadlittleboy-com)]

I still see it regularly. I'm fairly certain that it is easy to reproduce. The steps I go through when I see it:

1. Connect to a VPN (cisco anyconnect for me).
2. Do work.
3. Suspend computer without remembering to disconnect from the VPN.
4. Wake up computer (usually after at least an hour).

When I this happens, I lose access to the VPN portion of the menu, and I've also noticed that I can no longer connect to hidden wireless networks (though non-hidden, pre-configured networks are fine, probably because I don't have to go through the menu for them). If I do remember to disconnect from the VPN before suspending (or if I just didn't happen to need the VPN at that time), it comes back from suspend just fine every time.

[yannack (yannack)]

I have the same workflow and see the bug as well (also using a Cisco VPN)

[Marius B. Kotsbak (mariusko)]

@David, if we are able to reproduce this, I think we should try to get more debug logs. Please try to add

[logging]
level=DEBUG

to /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf

and see if there are any more information available in syslog then.

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

Nah, sadly, it's not tied to any actual error messages.

Instead, I'd recommend running nm-applet in valgrind (see http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Valgrind for the command line on how to do this).

I've fixed two additional, potentially pretty big leaks in Quantal, so it could explain why it's harder to see now (or no longer an issue?). It would be good if those who can reproduce this easily could test on a Quantal LiveCD if they can still see the issue, especially if it's something that takes less than a day to show up :)

At the very least, I'll cherry-pick the patches applied to quantal and apply them to Precise, since it should be both trivial and a huge benefit to begin with. See bug 780602 for similar memleak kind of reports.

[Adam Seering (aseering)]

I have two machines, one running Precise and the other running Quantal. I see this issue just as often in one as in the other.

I have not had problems due to memory leaks / excessive memory usage on either machine. (There may have been leaks; I haven't watched closely; but the amount used by nm-applet et al has never been problematic for me.)

I see several different symptoms associated with this Bug entry. I have only ever seen one specific problem: The "VPN Connections" menu is completely empty. It does seem to be associated with the system going to sleep and waking up again. Killing and restarting nm-applet always fixes the problem. Other sub-menus may also disappear (right now I'm seeing this issue and "More Networks" is also empty), but I don't use any other menus often enough to speak to it.

This reproduces regularly for me. Not after every suspend/resume but after most.

Let me know if further debugging would be useful. I'll try running in Valgrind; I don't think there's a memory leak but could believe some sort of memory stomp or other issue.

[Nicholas Mangold (nic-mangold)]

I confirm, this is still an issue in 12.04. After returning from suspend, the nm-applet sub-menu flyouts are empty. Killing and restarting nm-applet will temporarily return the flyout menu options.

[Vadim Peretokin (vperetokin)]

I think the WinSwitch project ran into a similar issue:
http://winswitch.org/trac/ticket/161

Perhaps the problem is appindicators themselves failing?

On Mon, Dec 3, 2012 at 7:00 PM, Nicholas Mangold <email address hidden>wrote:

> I confirm, this is still an issue in 12.04. After returning from
> suspend, the nm-applet sub-menu flyouts are empty. Killing and
> restarting nm-applet will temporarily return the flyout menu options.
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to a
> duplicate bug report (806004).
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/779754
>
> Title:
> NM status icon sometimes not clickable
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager-applet/+bug/779754/+subscriptions
>

[Domen Kožar (ielectric+)]

Same here running 12.04 with latests updates. What can I do to help with debugging?

[Alexander List (alexlist)]

This is still present in 13.04. "More networks" and "VPN Connections" flyouts are empty after suspend...

[Ma Hsiao-chun (mahsiaochun)]

I saw this bug on my Saucy box also.
But it disappears when I switched from b43 driver to wl driver.

[Ma Hsiao-chun (mahsiaochun)]

I reproduced same issue with wl driver just now.

[Alexander List (alexlist)]

On a side note, when using nmcli I see all the connections, and can also establish/unestablish them. So I assume it is definitely a problem with nm-applet and not NetworkManager itself.

This is a really annoying problem for those affected - what can we do to help you reproduce/diagnose/fix it?

[liminal (mrphconnor)]

I see this same problem every day.. it is very annoying.
Currently running 11.04 LTS but I see there no point in ungrading either.

If you want logs.. I can recreate whenever and drown you in them.

[Adam Seering (aseering)]

Oh yeah -- I ran nm-applet through Valgrind; I did not see any memory leaks due to this occurring.

I'm likewise glad to generate logs, run experiments, etc. I know my way around code in general, though not Network Manager in particular.

The issue I'm seeing is exclusively with sub-menus. (Is that true for others?) If this is the case, and if folks are unable to track it down, would it make sense to provide a way to display the top N VPN connections inline (as is done with WiFi connections)? This might not fix the bug, but it'd solve the 80% use case and would make the UI arguably more consistent.

[liminal (mrphconnor)]

I am seeing this bug on standard Wifi connections without any VPN

However i agree it appears to be a sub menu issue.. as I often use two adapters simultaneously
One internal
One External

But it is not limited to VPN in anyway

[Adam Seering (aseering)]

Yeah, it's not limited to VPN.

I use two adapters as well; each gets an entry in the main menu along with a few basic options, as well as (for WiFi) the first few nearby access points. The sub-menu is only needed if the access point I want isn't among the top few. (With Ethernet adapters, I don't have a sub-menu at all; everything is in the main menu.) So while that sub-menu is also usually broken / not available, I don't always need it.

With VPN, everything to do with VPN is in the sub-menu. So if sub-menus are broken, I lose all functionality.

Obviously, fixing the bug would be best. But this bug is over two years old; it sounds like either the package is not being actively maintained (in which case we're sunk) or the developer doesn't know how to approach this issue (which is fair -- it could be in an underlying library, some really obscure race condition, etc) in which case maybe a simpler patch that helps some of us a lot would be better than nothing.

[Ma Hsiao-chun (mahsiaochun)]

By the way, there seem to have no network-manager service anymore.
Every time I try to restart "networking" service, I got Unity panel disappear and keyboard unable (so I have to reboot by power button).

[Ma Hsiao-chun (mahsiaochun)]

The root cause in my case seem to be that NM is struck in asleep state.

http://paste.ubuntu.com/5743954/

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Please don't run 'sudo service networking restart' as it will break things. You can instead use 'sudo service network-manager restart'.

[Ma Hsiao-chun (mahsiaochun)]

sudo service net + TAB doesn't give network-manager, as I tried, it actually exists, strangle.
# Saucy

[liminal (mrphconnor)]

Restarting doesn't solve the problem anyway, so not sure why'd you bother.

I think this issue might be related to the autoconnecting of different wifi ssid
Is there anyway to turn this off in NM?

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

The problem with this was that nm-applet was exhausting the number of available IDs for the indicator -- when that happens, the indicator will stop working. This is related to the memory leak issue.

We've fixed this in libdbusmenu already, closing as Fix Released.