Losing WiFi connection frequently after last update (0.4.4)

Troubleshooting
1

I’ve being experiencing constant problems with the WiFi connection of the Raspberry Pi.

Before 0.4.4 it happened a few times but everything would work normally after a few minutes.

That’s not the case anymore. Sometimes I can’t get access even after a couple of hours and the only solution is to unplug the Raspberry Pi (which I know can corrupt my memory card).

I have a Raspberry Pi 3 with Brewpi Spark v2 and the official power supply (CanaKit 2.5A).

Is anybody else having this kind of problem? Suggestions?

2

I really doubt this is related to the 0.4.4 firmware. That should not be related to WiFi.

In Safari you sometimes get ‘script not running’ intermittently, but this can be resolved by setting the KeepAliveTimeout to 99 instead of 5 in the apache config.

3

Yeah, maybe it’s a coincidence, but since the updater also update the entire SO I thought it might be related.

I already did the KeepAlive thing but my problem is a bit worse as I can’t even ssh or ping the Pi server.

4

After plugging in a monitor I could see the broken connection icon on the main panel with ‘No wireless interface found’.

Rebooting made everything OK. It seems like the wireless is entering in sleep mode or something.

I just did a dist-upgrade. Let’s see how things go from now.

5

I’ve been diagnosing a similar problem recently. The Pi 3’s built in wifi was losing connection every couple of minutes (but coming back up immediately afterwards). It looks like it is going into a power save mode. For me the problems started at the time of 2 changes: a new install of dd-wrt on the wifi router and a raspbian dist-upgrade. I don’t know if one of the two or a combination caused the problem. Here’s what I found, your mileage may vary.

I tried the disabling power saving of the wifi adapter using iw wlan0 set power_save off, but that didn’t change anything. Although iwconfig shows Power Management is off, it still keeps disconnecting every couple of minutes.

The workaround I’ve used during my last ferment is to open a screen session to keep a ping job to my router running. Without the ping running, the pi was reconnecting at least a dozen times an hour. With the job running, the connection has remained stable for the last 10 days. I’ll probably set up a cron job to keep alive the wifi instead of the screen session.

6

Hi @robvdw, after the dist-upgrade I haven’t experienced any of the problems I related.

It was a huge update (several megabytes) with interface changes and such.

Thanks for the response. I really didn’t consider running a ping to the router, which obviously would prevent the sleep mode being set on.