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I connect wirelessly to a router using wicd 1.7.2.4 on slackware 14. If I am not actively using the internet connection for some time then I lose the connection, but wicd does not automatically reconnect, even though this option is checked for the WPA2 network concerned. The wicd-client gui at that point shows "Not Connected" in its status line. If I then press the Connect button for that network it instantly reconnects.

There is no entry in /var/log/wicd/wicd.log to show that connection has been lost, nor that it is trying to reconnect, as far as the log is concerned everything is still A-OK.

Any suggestions?

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I've not been able to find any convenient method of fixing this through wicd itself, because it required killing both monitor.py and wicd-daemon.py and restarting them, which must be done as root.

But a much simpler approach does the job, that is keep the connection alive, as with this user level script 

  while [ 0 ]; do
    a=$(ping -c 1 google.com)
    if [ "$a" == "ping: unknown host google.com" ]; then
      echo "Connection lost $(date)" > $HOME/connect.lost
      break
    fi
    sleep 6
  done
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  • How does this work? Is "connect.lost" a special file monitored for by wicd?
    – Willem
    Commented Jan 2, 2020 at 17:50
  • No, it just kept pinging google while maybe I was making no other use of the web at all, i.e. just busywork for wicd to keep it active. I thought at the time maybe it was a security feature in wicd, that it automatically disconnected after a certain time with no activity, rather than keeping a port open unnecessarily..
    – user985675
    Commented Jan 4, 2020 at 19:01
  • That doesn't make sense at all.
    – Willem
    Commented Jan 4, 2020 at 23:28
  • How do you know that?
    – user985675
    Commented Jan 7, 2020 at 21:04
  • 1
    I'm sorry, I'll clarify. It doesn't make sense for wicd to disconnect from a wifi access point because a specific IP connection is open "too long". IP protocol is handled by the kernel and the traffic you push through wicd is of no concern to wicd. Wicd isn't even responsible for actually connecting to the wifi network, it asks the kernel to do that. And as a security feature it doesn't make sense either, wicd is not antivirus/firewall software and doesn't even handle the WPA encryption directly, that's done by kernel/drivers. It just allows you to configure some parts of the kernel.
    – Willem
    Commented Jan 29, 2020 at 11:30

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