Workaround the broken Wifi driver

[bochecha]

The Ideasbox has a pretty terrible Wifi driver. The connection is very unstable.

But disabling the power management seems to help a lot.

Maybe at some point @mgautierfr can dust up his kernel-development skills and fix the driver, but in the meantime, this does the trick.

Basically, we'd need ansiblecube to create the /etc/modprobe.d/rtl8723be.conf file with this content:

options rtl8723be fwlps=0

It requires a reboot to take effect (or maybe just the right modprobe invocation).

This is only to be done on Ideasbox servers.

[yohanboniface]

The Koombook (or is it the Ideasbox? no idea... @yohanboniface ?) has a pretty terrible Wifi driver.

The fix has been tested only for Ideasbox server (Peren-IT) in Bardarash, and yes fixed the issue of unstable connection between the server and an AP (we are not talking about the laptop<=>server connection).
I think this should be rolled out in all the servers with double wifi cards (maybe checking that the wifi card is the same?).

Also, the same kind of trick may help on the Koombook side, given we seem to have (at least in the RedCross one) the same issue.

[bochecha]

So on the Koombook:

  idVendor           0x148f Ralink Technology, Corp.
  idProduct          0x5370 RT5370 Wireless Adapter

Driver seems to be rt2800usb.

Which means the Wi-Fi issue are indeed different on the Koombook and Ideasbox.

Therefore, let me amend the initial description of this ticket to avoid confusion and make it clear that this ticket is only about the Ideasbox.

...

Done.

[bochecha]

I was suggested to use ips=0 to make the connection stabler by Larry Finger, the maintainer of the RTL8723BE driver.

[fheslouin]

Added in commit 60fbf69

@bochecha can you try the option ips=0 ? If it improve the wifi stability we will had it to module.

[fheslouin]

Apparently we still have some issue, currently with one server using rtl8723be driver.
@letompouce is going to investigate on this. Could you keep us up to date ?

[bochecha]

@bochecha can you try the option ips=0 ? If it improve the wifi stability we will had it to module.

I did try it, sorry for never reporting on it.

In my limited testing I didn't see any difference between using this or not using it.

[fheslouin]

options rtl8723be fwlps=0 has been added here https://github.com/ideascube/ansiblecube/blob/oneUpdateFile/roles/system/tasks/realtek.yml#L13

ips=0 should be tried on rtl8723be driver