NixOS deactivates wifi hard blocked when in docking station

Help
1

Hello,
I installed a fresh NixOS on LVM on a L490i7 connected to a Lenovo Pro Dock.

If the Laptop is connected to the docking station the wifi card is hard blocked (disconnected). Is this the NixOS default and is there a way to activate the wifi card even in the dock with wired connection?

2

I’m curious to know how you determined that the wifi card was hard blocked, and network manager did not, say, favor a wired Ethernet connection over a wifi connection. What does the networking attrset of your configuration contain? Did the laptop have the same behavior on other OSs?

3

wifi if crossed in the applet and blocked yes in rfkill list

on Ubuntu it runs fine (without to change networking configs)

4

rfkill list should tell you if it’s a hardware or software block. To be sure, is it a software block? I agree that this is unexpected, especially because I have not run into this behavior before. For reference, my old Dell E6430 with a dock did not have this behavior on 19.03 (I have since retired the laptop). Care to share your networking attrset? maybe something there could help determine the issue.

5

Hello theotherjimmy,

I have not saved the config of that time.

  • currently I’m changing too much to do everything isolated … (I cannot switch which in the docking station … and the reboot takes minutes [before is was seconds] but I tries to redo lost of changes without effect … )

rfkill list

0: tpacpi_bluetooth_sw: Bluetooth
        Soft blocked: yes
        Hard blocked: no
1: tpacpi_wwan_sw: Wireless WAN
        Soft blocked: yes
        Hard blocked: no
2: phy0: Wireless LAN
        Soft blocked: no
        Hard blocked: yes

that only the current version.

  networking= {
    hostName = hostnamePC ; 

    networkmanager = {
      enable = true; ## only or wireless.enable = true;
      packages = [ pkgs.networkmanagerapplet ];
    };

    useDHCP = false;
    interfaces = {
      docker0.useDHCP = true;
      virbr0.useDHCP = true;
      virbr0-nic.useDHCP = true;
      #wlp6s0.useDHCP = true;
      enp0s31f6.useDHCP = true;
  	  wlp5s0.useDHCP = true;
  	  wwp0s20f0u9.useDHCP = true;
    };
    };

Now I have to see if the reties of DHCP come up again → because only in the docking station when wifi is blocked the issue appears (for now).

6

I think networking.networkmanager and networking.interfaces.<name>.useDHCP might cause conflicts. From what I gather, the dhcpcd module (https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/e1e044e70eba8c624b7eb1e54eab08c6ee4f55dd/nixos/modules/services/networking/dhcpcd.nix) uses the networking.interfaces.<name>.useDHCP config, and it has a similar affect to networking.useDHCP except that it configures dhcpcd to only affect those interfaces. If any of those interfaces are also managed by networkmanager, you may run into trouble.

1 Like
7

thnaks, I have to rethink what I have done.