I've started to debug my Squeezebox Radios because like many others, my WiFi has been constantly disconnecting. As I have 2 x Radios, I can compare symptoms.
One constant mentioned in many of the threads is interference and possible misconfiguration of the network the Radio is connected to. So I wanted to eliminate as many problems as possible. I'm pretty sure at this point that my own network is fine, and that I'm suffering from interference from other networks. There are 16 x 2.4GHz access points visible here. I believe one of them is a Sky mesh network that sounds pretty intrusive. All of these networks are on channels 1, 6, or 11, but I assume they can/will channel hop. I've tried configuring my network to disable auto-channel and use a different channel. And that hasn't helped at all. Whatever the interference is doing to the Radio, it's pretty severely messing it, because I haven't found a graceful way to recover. I thought I'd try building a Faraday cage around my Radio and access point, so there was definitely no interference. Well, I didn't quite succeed with the various methods I tried. In the end, I have 1 Radio wrapped in about a dozen layers of aluminium foil. And it still gets a strong signal from my WiFi network. Weird. The positive step is that it only sees one other access point during a scan, and even then, not all the time. The Faraday Radio has been up and connected to the Wifi for 30 hours right now with no issues. The non-Faraday radio can't keep a connection up for more than 20 minutes. Occasionally it will last longer. I've connected to the serial port and from wpa_cli, and after the network has dropped, everything looks like it might be working, except, I only see one access point - the one it was previously connected to. The other 16 APs are not shown in the scan once the network has dropped, but they are there normally. >From the commandline, I've tried restarting wpa_supplicant, I've upgraded wap_supplicant (and wpa_cli) to a newer version (v2.9) as per another thread: https://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?111663-Community-Build-Radio-Firmware&p=978912#post978912 I've found that this sequence is the only way I can get the WiFi to reconnect without rebooting the device: /etc/init.d/wlan stop /etc/init.d/wlan start udhcpc -R -a -p /var/run/udhcpc.eth1.pid -b --syslog -i eth1 -H SqueezeboxRadio -s /etc/network/udhcpc_action There are probably better ways to restart it, but the main thing is, by manually repeating the steps in /etc/init.d/wlan, unless I unload and reload the Atheros firmware, there is no way I can reconnect the WiFi. There are many tricks I won't have tried, of course. I'm no WPA expert. ANd I haven't even touched on wmiconfig. So even if I can work out an automated way to reload the firmware every time the WiFi signal dies, I don't think it's a viable solution whilst listening to music. I've googled around the Atheros AR6002, I can see there's a copy of the firmware on kernel.org: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/tree/ath6k/AR6002 $ ll AR6002 total 112K -rw-rw-r-- 1 ryan ryan 97K Sep 26 2017 athwlan.bin.z77 -rw-rw-r-- 1 ryan ryan 1.4K Sep 26 2017 data.patch.hw2_0.bin -rw-rw-r-- 1 ryan ryan 784 Sep 26 2017 eeprom.bin -rw-rw-r-- 1 ryan ryan 48 Sep 26 2017 eeprom.data What is a z77 file? Some sort of compression? It's not recognised by 7zip, at least. But it looks quite different from what I see in /lib/atheros: # ls -al /lib/atheros/ -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 150911 Jan 1 1970 ar6000.ko -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 177073 Jan 1 1970 athwlan.bin -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 15279 Jan 1 1970 bmiloader -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 768 Jan 1 1970 calData_ar6102_15dBm.bin -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 836 Jan 1 1970 data.patch.hw2_0.bin -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 19454 Jan 1 1970 eeprom.AR6002 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 12312 Jan 1 1970 loadAR6000l.sh -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 110242 Jan 1 1970 wmiconfig I'm tempted to give it try anyway, but I'm not hopeful it'll even load, never mind work. I anyone has any more detailed knowledge about all this stuff, I'd be interested to hear if there's a way out of this hole. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ omnium21's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=70334 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=97791 _______________________________________________ Radio mailing list Radio@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/radio
