[GTALUG] Laptop (very) weirdness

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sun, Dec 10, 2017 at 07:26:03PM -0500, Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote:
> My dual-boot  Asus laptop now exhibits very strange behaviour.
> 
> Under Windows 10 all is normal (well, its form of normal).
> 
> Under Linux (current mint KDE)  at work, all seems ok.
> 
> At home, all hell breaks loose. The only difference is the wifi.
> 
> After a normal login not only does networking not come up but the KDE menu
> bar doesn't display upon startup, all I have is the KDE wallpaper and a
> working xterm. Simple commands work but 'sudo bash' hangs.
> 
> If I try to shutdown the system hangs. ALT-F1 gives me some kind of massive
> dump starting with the lines:
> 
> BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at 000000000000011c
> IP iul_num_add_sta+0x49e/0x720 [iwlmvm]
> 
> Can anyone make sense of why simply using a different wifi router would
> cause this? An inability to connect is one thing, but this is nuts.
> 
> (And people ask me why I hesitate to recommend desktop Linux to
> non-techies...)
> 
> Happy to bring it in to Tuesday's meeting if anyone can help...
> 
> - Evan (on mobile)

Sounds a bit like this:

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=195299

So if it is that it should be fixed in 4.14 kernel.  Not sure what
current mint uses.  A search seems to indicate it may be 4.10.

It sounds like the trigger is a router using an illegal channel width
on some channels on 5GHz.  At least that was what one person found.

-- 
Len Sorensen