Re: Airplane mode setting not saved after restart

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 2013-02-05 at 10:44 +0200, John G. wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I rarely use my laptop's wifi, so I enable airplane mode (aka rfkill)
> from gnome nm applet to disable it completely (it doesn't have a
> hardware switch). The problem is that after every restart this setting
> isn't saved. The wifi interface is still down but rfkill is not used
> (airplane mode is off). So I have to use the rfkill program with a
> startup script. Sometimes when I need wifi, I have to either disable
> the startup script or manually enable wifi after every restart.  This
> doesn't seem very practical to me. Is this intended or should I open a
> bug?

There are two settings at play here; rfkill and NM on/off.  rfkill may
or may not be present, and may or may not be saved over restart, since
it's a hardware/bios thing that we can't control.

Thus NM has a wifi on/off toggle as well, which *is* preserved over
restarts.  This gets toggled when you flip the switch, and NM will also
flip the hardware rfkill if available to ensure the radio is dead.  This
value should always follow what you have told NM either through the
applet or through "nmcli nm wifi on/off", and again, is different than
hardware rfkill.

It seems like there's something we need to debug further, since the
value should be getting saved
to /var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state.  Does that file exist
for you and if so, what's in it after you flip the switch?

Dan