If you are experiencing drop outs on your wifi interent connection, it could be that your dongle is turning itself off after an idle period. To stop your wifi dongle doing this, we need to disable its power management.

Either SSH to your Pi, or login to its desktop and open up a terminal.

First, make a backup of your existing interfaces file:

sudo cp /etc/network/interfaces /etc/network/interfaces.backup

Now edit the original interfaces file:

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

Assuming you haven’t edited this file before all you need to do is delete its entire contents, and copy the following into it:

auto lo



iface lo inet loopback

iface eth0 inet dhcp



auto wlan0

allow-hotplug wlan0

iface wlan0 inet dhcp

wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

wireless-power off

iface default inet dhcp

The important block of code here is:

auto wlan0

allow-hotplug wlan0

iface wlan0 inet dhcp

wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

wireless-power off

iface default inet dhcp

So only add that section if you have a custom configuration for any other network interfaces.

Now exit the nano editor and save your changes:

Ctrl+x

Y

Enter

Now reboot your raspberry pi:

sudo reboot

Once the raspberry pi has rebooted, check that the wifi dongle’s power management has been disabled by typing this command:

iwconfig

And checking for: “Power Management:off”