How to enable/disable laptop wireless hardware (Shallow Thoughts)

How to enable/disable laptop wireless hardware

My Lenovo laptop has a nifty button, Fn-F5, to toggle wi-fi and bluetooth on and off. Works fine, and the indicator lights (of which the Lenovo has many -- it's quite nice that way) obligingly go off or on.

But when I suspend and resume, the settings aren't remembered. The machine always comes up with wireless active, even if it wasn't before suspending.

Since wireless can be a drain on battery life, as well as a potential security issue, I don't want it on when I'm not actually using it. So I wanted a way to turn it off programmatically.

The answer, it turns out, is rfkill.

$ rfkill list
0: tpacpi_bluetooth_sw: Bluetooth
        Soft blocked: yes
        Hard blocked: no
0: phy0: Wireless LAN
        Soft blocked: yes
        Hard blocked: no

tells you what hardware is currently enabled or disabled.

To toggle something off,

$ rfkill block bluetooth
$ rfkill block wifi

Type rfkill -h for more details on arguments you can use.

Fn-F5 still works to enable or disable them together. I think this is being controlled by /etc/acpi/ibm-wireless.sh, though I can't find where it's tied to Fn-F5.

You can make it automatic by creating /etc/pm/sleep.d/. (That's on Ubuntu; of course, the exact file location may vary with distro and version.) To disable wireless on resume, do this:

#! /bin/sh

case "$1" in
  resume)
    rfkill block bluetooth
    rfkill block wifi
    ;;
esac
exit $?

Of course, you can also tie that into other things, like your current network scheme, or what wireless networks are visible (which you can get with iwlist wlan0 scan).

Tags: linux, ubuntu, laptop, tip
[ 19:46 Mar 04, 2013    More linux/laptop | permalink to this entry | ]