Hardware wifi is diabled, but there is no disable button! How can I enable it?

Question

My Thinkpad 410s laptop has been working fine, running Ubuntu for quite some time. Yesterday, my wifi stopped working out of the blue.

I've ran rfkill list and it shows the wifi adapter as blocked both on the software and hardware levels. I've ran rfkill unblock all, and this gets rid of the software level block.

However, my laptop doesn't seem to have any hardware level "block wifi" button. Does anyone know how I can re-enable my wifi? I checked the BIOS, and wifi is enabled there. I don't think anything physical happened to my wifi card, I believe the problem is software related, but I haven't find any software method to solve it.

Update - I forgot to mention this, but I have no obvious wifi button on my keyboard, even when counting FN keys.

Answer 1

That model has a wireless switch on the same side as the optical drive, under the express card slot - look at the 'connectivity and ports' section of this random review.

The key combo for both thinkpads I have to do wireless things is fn f5, but iirc that's software based.

Answer 2

Look for a wireless symbol in a different colour on one of the keys on your keyboard (probably one of the Function keys). If you do find it, then hold the "Fn" key while pressing it once -- this may turn the Wireless NIC back on again.

(It's possible that it was toggled off by accident in this manner, or that some hardware-based power management shut it off automatically {although this is very rare and I've only encountered one laptop so far that had this feature in the hardware without needing software interaction}, etc.).