Question mark icon instead of wifi icon

I installed Ubuntu 18.04 right now and after connecting to the internet instead of a network icon there is a question mark. There is no network issues, but that question mark is annoying.

1

8 Answers

Settings > Privacy > Connectivity Checking

Set it OFF. (Then, restart your WiFi connection, thanks to @Dante's comment below).

This is the same fiasco as Microsoft's NCSI (Network Connectivity Status Indicator), a false negative to try ruin your mood.

And, yeah, it would be checking some URL like that one.

9

I solved it differently because I am able to find the root cause which is kind of different from what you get.

Open the log app and search for 'network', I see following error message

... result="fail" reason="Connection 'Ethernet connection 1' is not available on device ens33 because device is strictly unmanaged"

This is how I solved it:

Open

sudo nano /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf

and change the line managed=false to managed=true

Then,

sudo service network-manager restart

2

I have the exact same problem, but it is sporadic: The icon is fine most of the time, except after some events, e.g. installing updates, it turns into a question mark, while the connection is still fine.

Rebooting works, sure, but I don't have the patience for that. OTOH, restarting the network manager seems to do the trick in most cases:

sudo service network-manager restart

Hope this helps to someone!

I've had that issue with other versions of Ubuntu. I had similar Theme issues after upgrading to 18.04.

Change the icon theme. You can do this with Gnome Tweaks.

It's not installed by default. Install it with:

$ apt install gnome-tweak

From there click on Appearance -> (click) Icons. Then select a different theme.

I've seen occasions where changing to a different theme and changing back sometimes resolved a glitch that was happening with the current preferred theme.

8

I had this issue, along with a very slow internet connection - due to the fact that I had used expressvpn, and I recently uninstalled it.

The problem was that uninstalling with apt remove expressvpn didn't clean up after it completely, so I still had a broken expressvpn service trying to run in systemd.

After I ran apt purge expressvpn, everything started working nicely, and the questionmark over my WiFi icon is gone.

The question mark seems, at least in my case, to signify that I am connected to a VPN. If you too are connected, disconnect and then restart your network manager using the command below.

sudo service network-manager restart

I had the same issue Ubuntu 20.04. None of the above solution worked. I turned Automatic DNS off and put in an IP 8.8.8.8 or what ever your DNS is.

0

I had this error in ubuntu groovy. ping -c4 google.de told me temporary failure in name resolution

ping -c 8.8.8.8 instead works.

So access to internet was possible. Meaning no hardware issue or in my module. I create

/etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/no-systemd-resolv.conf
# wlan-verbindung für NetworkManager fixen
[main]
systemd-resolved=false

I restarted systemd-resolved and NetworkManager Services.

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