I have two access points available at home. They share the same SSID and the same security settings: WPA2, AES, same pre shared key. I have Two Android devices and one Acer laptop with Windows 10 installed. all of these roam perfectly when getting far away from one AP and near the other one.
In addition, I have 2 Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 6th generation laptops with Intel 8265 adapter running Ubuntu 18.04. These do not roam unfortunately and stick to the currently connected AP. I use iwconfig and see that the far away currently connected AP signal level is -82 dBm and using iwlist scan I see the nearby AP has a signal level of -38 dBm. Still, roaming does not happen. If I turn the Wi-Fi off and on, the close AP is being used as expected.
Here are the available firmware versions:
$ ls -al /lib/firmware/*8265*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2389968 Nov 17 2017 /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-8265-21.ucode
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1811984 Apr 24 2018 /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-8265-22.ucode
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2234528 Dec 5 2017 /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-8265-27.ucode
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2307104 Dec 6 2017 /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-8265-31.ucode
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2440780 Apr 25 2018 /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-8265-34.ucode
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2498044 Jun 17 15:56 /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-8265-36.ucode
I tried the following but they seem to have no effect:
- Based on this explanation I tried disabling Wi-Fi power saving by setting
wifi.powersave = 2in/etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/. - Based on this answer regarding roaming aggressiveness I set the following parameters in
/etc/modprobe.d/aggressive-wifi-roaming.conf:
options mac80211 probe_wait_ms=100 # instead of 500 by default
options mac80211 max_probe_tries=1 # instead of 5 by default
options mac80211 beacon_loss_count=1 # instead of 7 by default
When testing on the same laptop using Ubuntu 20.04.1 live, the roaming issue is gone.
How should I further debug / fix this on Ubuntu 18.04?
ls -al /lib/firmware/*8265*. Boot to a Ubuntu Live 20.04.1 DVD/USB and see if roaming works.