WiFi on a headless PC using a laptop NIC
I've seen lots of posts concerning turning off WiFi on a laptop or using a button on the laptop to turn on wireless, but nothing that covers this situation. There are a number of bookshelf PCs, including the Intel NUC line of computers that use the same mini PCI cards as laptop computers such as the Intel Centrino Wireless-N 2230. Upon detecting this card, Debian Jessie uses the rfkill API to soft block the wireless adapter, assuming this to be a laptop who should not have WiFi enabled unless the user specifically enables it manually. Of course, if there were a monitor and keyboard attached, one can simply issue an unblock directive using the rfkill utility. Even if the unit is headless, but has the wired port up and running, one can login remotely and do the same thing. Unfortunately, this system has neither. It is a headless, wireless PC used to control light shows. Consequently, the wireless interface must come up and stay up when the unit boots, and it does not.
I filed a bug report (reportbug 779732) back in early March, but no one has ever responded. To work around the issue, I run a short script every minute via cron that uses rfkill to see if the port is blocked and unblocks it if it is. This works fairly well, but it is a kludge and it is not terribly quick to respond when the system automatically soft blocks the wireless adapter. How can I prevent this from ever happening in the first place?
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