Disabling Airplane Mode Does Not Enable the Modem
On the OG PinePhone, Manjaro Stable, community firmware (0.6.7), I enabled airplane mode on a flight through the Quick Settings panel; at the end of the flight, I disabled it, only to find my phone would no longer connect to the carrier. Wifi and bluetooth can both be enabled normally.
It appears that disabling airplane mode does not run the command nmcli radio wwan on
but after figuring this out, I rebooted the device to see if it would persist and now the hardware is not even found.
nmcli general status
STATE CONNECTIVITY WIFI-HW WIFI WWAN-HW WWAN
connected full enabled enabled missing enabled
nmcli radio all
WIFI-HW WIFI WWAN-HW WWAN
enabled enabled missing enabled
nmcli device status
DEVICE TYPE STATE CONNECTION
wlan0 wifi connected Private24
p2p-dev-wlan0 wifi-p2p disconnected --
lo loopback unmanaged --
sudo nmcli device show
help lo p2p-dev-wlan0 wlan0
While attempting to find out what happened, the device magically started up again. I am unsure what brought it up. I ran another reboot and the connection persisted.
To fix this, I ran the following two commands and rebooted a couple of times.
nmcli radio wwan on
sudo nmcli d connect cdc-wdm0
All seems well at this point. This would appear then to have been triggered by when airplane mode is disabled, the related code does not run the proper commands to bring the radio back online.
Troubleshooting
Checking Settings > Cellular, showed the modem was recognized but its status was "disabled".I am able to enable the modem again manually with sudo mmcli -m $MODEMNUMBER -e
, yet this does not re-enable the data connection but does permit a cell connection. Enabling the modem this way is lost when waking from sleep and reboot/power off|on. Thus the modem must be enabled again on boot.
Is there a more permanent temporary fix (e.g., some persistent AT command)? Is this a known issue in the Quick Settings code?
Running nmtui to activate the data connection reports that cdc-wdm0 is unavailable. Running ip a
shows:
3: wwan0: <POINTOPOINT,MULTICAST,NOARP> mtu 1500 qdisc noop state DOWN group default qlen 1000
link/none
Running sudo up link set wwan0 up
does enable the interface and reports an inet6 address, but it does not grant a data connection.
3: wwan0: <POINTOPOINT,MULTICAST,NOARP,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000
link/none
inet6 $IPV6/64 scope link stable-privacy
valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
Attempting to run nmtui to activate the data connection reports the same error: cdc-wdm0 unavailable.
The Network menu item in Cellular -> Sim shows my operator after running the mmcli enable, but the APN list is greyed out and inaccessible.
Restarting the phone after enabling wwan0 brings the phone back to the "airplane" mode. My cellular connection is broken and wwan0 is disabled, requiring me to run the various commands.
nmcli reports the following:
nmcli d status
DEVICE TYPE STATE CONNECTION
wlan0 wifi connected Private24
p2p-dev-wlan0 wifi-p2p disconnected --
cdc-wdm0 gsm unavailable --
lo loopback unmanaged --
Attempting to connect it reports the nmtui error:
sudo nmcli d up cdc-wdm0
Error: Failed to add/activate new connection: Connection 'cdc-wdm0' is not available on device cdc-wdm0 because device is not available
sudo nmcli d connect cdc-wdm0
Error: Failed to add/activate new connection: Connection 'cdc-wdm0' is not available on device cdc-wdm0 because device is not available
sudo nmcli device show cdc-wdm0
GENERAL.DEVICE: cdc-wdm0
GENERAL.TYPE: gsm
GENERAL.HWADDR: (unknown)
GENERAL.MTU: 0
GENERAL.STATE: 20 (unavailable)
GENERAL.CONNECTION: --
GENERAL.CON-PATH: --
The issue appears to have been the radio being disabled. Ran nmcli radio wwan on
and was able to get a successful run of cdc-wdm0.
nmcli radio all
WIFI-HW WIFI WWAN-HW WWAN
enabled enabled enabled enabled