Hello I very much appreciate your help with this. I am "microwave sensitive", or whatever you want to call it. I have been involved in computer design and programming for decades. It is quite ironic, but the WIFI, Bluetooth, (and cell phones for that matter) are now giving me headaches. So I either turn the power down very low, or turn them off. I certainly don't want to get nailed by my machine when I boot it. It takes time to type a bunch of commands, and often a person needs to sit next to the offending machine while doing so.
I. Bluetooth
I understand that some people have Bluetooth keyboards and the like -- but of course I don't have any such peripherals. Yet, it seems to be impossible to convince Bluetooth not to fire up. I've gone through the rc.d scripts, I found the link to the init.d script that starts the server, and I found the defaults file and set $BLUETOOTH_ENABLED=0. No matter what I do when I run bluetoothctl and type show, the Bluetooth peripheral is shown to be powered on and listening. Google searches have yielded other posters also saying they can't get it to shut up, and other suggestions were equal in that they did not work.
There is a nuance here. I don't want the service not to start per se, rather I want to make sure the card never transmits. Those might be different things. For all I know, out of the box and without a driver it is still going to spew microwaves all over the place. How can I set this so it is configured to never transmit?
II. WIFI
The WIFI card initializes at full power. The router with default settings does the same. They are like two people in a busy crowd screaming at each other to be heard, because everyone else is also screaming at each other to be heard. It is the stupidest default configuration choice possible. Makes me wonder what the heck my colleagues were thinking when they designed this stuff.
So I moved the router and knocked the power to the minimum setting. Now the hackers in the building down the street are only getting three bars reception from it, instead of the five they were getting before. I'm still getting five. Guess I'll take the antennas off or wrap them in foil .. anyway, this is a bit of a tangent ...
I found the txpower option in iwconfig and I can set the power on the linux box down to 1dbm, that works for me. However it is booting at 22dbm. I would rather it booted powered off with not even a beacon, and then I set the power, then if it has to be used, can turn it back on. xfce4 here has a network manager and I did turn the WIFI off by default, so does this mean the card is not transmitting?
I have a health issue with these devices, as increasingly so do many others (if you are getting pressure headaches ...), but there are also security issues here. Besides those microwave seeking missiles the Israelis used to nail a suspected militant ... it is also a bad deal if a hacker can start dumping data off the machine during boot, via a wireless network link. It really is best that the WIFI is not used, but if it must, it is best that it does not go far. Same for Bluetooth Etc.
Help with getting this machine to boot microwave quiet would be sincerely appreciated.