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Ultimately, I am trying to diagnose a wifi connection issue that I have had for over a month. Simply, it connects and at a random amount of time, disconnects (within 5min to 2hours). Nothing I can do to recover it unless I reboot.

Thses two commands below only result in a -bash error, I don't have this command. Should I have it? What do I need to install to get it? I can't find anything but man pages on usage. The Arch wiki has one article but it is in Italian.

ifdown mlan0, ifup mlan0

These commands below work but I am unsure of what is actually happening and how it differs from the above command.

ip link set mlan0 down, ip link set mlan0 up

Can anyone help an amatuer Arch user by giving a quick layman's definition?

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The ip commands is one of the tools from the iproute2 package, which control low-level Linux networking. It's sort of a replacement for ifconfig and does a lot more.

ifup and ifdown are usually distro-specific scripts that control statically-configured network devices (ex. when not managed by NetworkManager or other ...). It will likely use ip and other system tools to set up the network devices based on the boot-up network configuration.

For wireless devices, before the link is even bought up the wireless security/association needs to be set up and usually ifup takes care of that too. Various steps are required such as starting the using the WPA Supplicant daemon to handle WPA/WPA2 auth.

Once your wireless link is up you may be able to use ip to down and up the network device, but you cannot use it before the wireless layer is configured.

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  • I actually have both a static dhcp in dhcpcd.conf at boot via systemctl and networkmanager. hmmm... so, i should be able to bring the wifi back up once its down. networkmanager is always connected to the router but it will suddenly just stop for no apparent reason. i mean network manager shows a connection but i dont have internet for some reason. something is going on internally that i just dont understand at my skill level.im waiting for it to quit again to see if there is a command i can use to bring it back to at least keep me from having to reboot every time. it gets annoying. haha
    – David
    Commented Nov 18, 2014 at 4:28

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