How to restart the network manager applet

Question

Sometimes my network manager indicator (applet) shows as if I'm not connected to wifi (no bars) and when I right click it it says "networking disabled" although I am connected to the internet. Maybe it's a bug or something.

Running sudo service network-manager restart fixes this applet. It restarts the whole network. Does anyone know a simple way to restart just the applet? (nm-applet)

Solution 1

You can restart nm-applet with this command from terminal:

killall nm-applet; nohup nm-applet &

or by restarting the network-manager service (which will restart nm-applet):

sudo systemctl restart network-manager

or

sudo service network-manager restart

---

Here is a YouTube video explaining the answer.

Solution 2

If you have gnome, restarting the shell (Alt-F2, r, Return) might do it.

Comments

[Ryan]

Is there a bug in Launchpad for this issue that we can follow? I'm more interested in "curing the disease" than "treating the symptom", so to speak.

[Dan Dascalescu]

I have the same problem in 16.04, and sudo service network-manager restart doesn't always fix it. For example, now the indicator shows zero "bars" and no network, even though I'm online typing this comment. Screenshot.

[Mina Michael]

@DanDascalescu see the accepted answer. use killall nm-applet; nohup nm-applet &

[isomorphismes]

@MinaMichael Thank you for the hint about sudo service ____ restart !!

[Mina Michael]

Sorry it didn't work for me. Btw I stated I'm on LXDE which is not gnome

[dpb]

Perfect -- working on 16.04 still.

[Youw]

I shouldn't try that when Pycharm/Chrome/A few ssh session are opened...

[Sideshowcoder]

does the trick on 16.10 as well, fixing the not discovering new wifi on the xps 13

[Zibri]

it doesn't work on 16.10. the app restarts but it does not show in taskbar. only works by restarting network-manager service. after killing nm-applet, not even restarting network manager shows it again, and I had to restart lightdm.

[Dan Dascalescu]

Worked on 16.04.2, while sudo service network-manager restart didn't (it led to the indicator showing zero "bars" and no network, even though I'm online typing this comment. Screenshot.

[Yonsy Solis]

but, how I can do the killall nm-applet && nohup nm-applet & automatically after resume ?

[dragon788]

@YonsySolis I'll see if I can find the question and answer that covers that, but it is a udev or systemd power state rule IIRC.

[FKEinternet]

I found nm-applet occupying the top 2 positions (sorted by CPU usage) in htop when I had a flaky Internet connection. The killall method seems to have cured both problems, thank you!

[pds]

killall nm-applet && nohup nm-applet & && disown -- Add disown to unhook executed job from the running shell.