Hello I am looking to see if the NVIDIA DGX Spark - 4TB is able to have the wifi and bluetooth capabilities removed
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Hi Lauren.smith, can you share more context around this request? use cas?
Hello, the use case is to have the NVIDIA DGX Spark without the wifi or the bluetooth capabilities because they are not authorized in the spaces we work in.
I have a similar use case where I would like to leverage a DGX Spark in a space where only devices without wifi capabilities are allowed.
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I supposed you could open the bottom of the machine and take out the wireless antenna so that the Wifi and bluetooth wouldn’t work.
How sure are you that it has a removeable antenna and it’s not built into the hardware?
DGX Spark is an integrated package. We do not support removing/modifying its hardware package.
Are there any plans in the future to offer a system without controlled capabilities of similar/same spec?
I don’t know if you can as I saw a video with the bottom taken off. I would hope you can disable all the wireless in software as you can with other computers such as Mac Mini.
There’s no option in the BIOS to disable wireless. Would rfkill block all command be enough for your restricted environment?
elsaco@spark:~$ rfkill list
0: hci0: Bluetooth
Soft blocked: yes
Hard blocked: no
1: phy0: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: yes
Hard blocked: no
I’m using soft block to disable wireless devices.
@elsaco I absolutely agree such control to turn off internal wifi or bluetooth should be exist within BIOS. DGX Spark BIOS feels like from a decade ago, and there’s certainly a room for improvement. Now that’s out of my system, you can turn it off using udev.
!!! WARNING! DON’T DO THIS IF YOU ARE NOT SURE.
IF YOU MAKE MISTAKE, YOU WILL HAVE TO USE THE RECOVERY IMAGE TO WIPE and RECOVER. I can create my test instance partition at will, so if I mess it up, I can just recreate it.
I only disabled the bluetooth and it worked, but same method should works for WiFi. Both WiFi and Bluetooth are same chip with combined capability but show up in different ports.
# DOUBLE-CHECK YOUR PORT. Yours might not be same as mine.
# Bluetooth:
$ lsusb | grep -i imc
Bus 011 Device 002: ID 13d3:3630 IMC Networks Wireless_Device
# WiFi:
$ lspci | grep -i media
0009:01:00.0 Network controller: MEDIATEK Corp. Device 7925
# Add the following line to /etc/udev/rules.d/99-disable-builtin-bluetooth.rules
# Change 11-2 to your port
$ sudo vi /etc/udev/rules.d/99-disable-builtin-bluetooth.rules
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="usb", KERNELS=="11-2", ATTR{authorized}="0"
$ sudo chmod 644 /etc/udev/rules.d/99-disable-builtin-bluetooth.rules
$ sudo udevadm control --reload-rules
# YOU MUST REBOOT
# After reboot, you will see in setting -> bluetooth that you no longer has bluetooth
# bluetoothctl list
Also if you are disabling bluetooth or WiFi to use your own external one, this method seems have a problem rebooting it after. Then just unplug the external one and power DGX off for a few minutes and restart.
There is also another method using modprobe. but when your kernel get updated, you can loose change or even worth… so I don’t use that.
P.S. - Ask AI how to do it, be specific, but don’t mention DGX Spark. It doesn’tt know it. It will think you want to do something with Apache Sparc cluster. To free AI, Say something like “Generate AI prompt to instruct an AI agent how to disable the internal WiFi device permanently in Ubuntu 24.04”. Feed the response to another AI. Gemini got me running around for hours while Claude gave the correct solution in just few attempts but probably because I ask Gemini to create a prompt to ask Claude.