Only on Elementary OS Loki 0.4, wifi and ethernet works for about 5 seconds, then nothing

Question

Normally I've found all I need without asking a question, so please forgive me for making my first post on Stackexchange. Basically on Freya, and in Windows, my wifi and ethernet connection is fine, however on Loki 0.4 (the official release), the wifi works for 5 seconds at best, and the ethernet is the same. When it stops working, Epiphany shows a 'temporary' DNS error, it can't find the IP. I tried using IP addresses instead of domain names and it worked as far as I can tell, so it must be a DNS error.

I tried ubuntu 16.04.1 and when I activate the additional drivers for my broadcom and intel chips the wifi and ethernet works fine, but before that the wifi card isn't even recognised, so it's a different problem to that of Loki where the wifi card is recognised right out of the box, just the DNS is not working.

I've tried manually adding in 8.8.8.8 as the DNS server, I've tried turning everything off and on again (restarting services), I've tried everything I've been able to find about resolvconf and network manager, but nothing was fixed the problem. I changed and installed Ubuntu Studio in the meantime, and I've been using the live usb of Loki to test for DNS fixes, it behaves the same way as my past install of Loki. Something specific to Loki 0.4 is messing with the DNS on my machine and making the DNS calls all fail after about 5 seconds of a connection.

I can't be the only one with this problem... Has anyone got any solutions for this type of problem (may not be Loki specific for others).

Thanks for your time, AB

By the way, computer: Lenovo Thinkpad E330

Answer 1

Same problem for my Lenovo. It seems to be something related to the Ethernet hardware power management.

You need to install a new driver.

sudo apt install linux-headers-generic build-essential git
git clone https://github.com/lwfinger/rtlwifi_new.git
cd rtlwifi_new
make
sudo make install
sudo reboot 

Answer 2

Thanks for everyone's help. I believe that through a combination of every solution given here, and this solutions first answer (the first half of the first answer) I have solved the wifi issue it seems. Although the connection is a bit slow, it seems ok for the moment. Hopefully sometime soon this hardware will get some more support out of the box to make elem OS more accessible.

Answer 3

You must to disable N to better performance. If your connection drop down after some minutes of use, disable power management. You can do this adding these options in a config file. From terminal:

echo "options iwlwifi 11n_disable=8 power_save=0 " | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwiwi.conf

Then restart and share your experience.