At some point in the past two years, my three Squeezebox Radios suddenly
lost their ability to stay connected to Wi-Fi. To get them reconnected I
would have to reboot them, but they would always lose their connection
again in as little as five minutes. They would almost never stay
connected for more than 40 minutes at a time. I was using a common
Linksys router, and nothing in my setup had changed. The Radios
basically became glorified clocks displayed in my home. My two
Squeezebox Touch units were unaffected, but the loss of the Radios
caused me to use the Touches less as well.
A few days ago I finally installed POMdev's wlanpoke on each Radio. This
fix has breathed new life into them--they now stay connected without the
need for frequent reboots. POMdev, I'm gratefulthank you very much.
In preparation to install the fix, I noticed that about six months ago,
in his (?) first (and so far only) post on this forum, mankan requested
that someone write "instructions for dummies" for wlanpoke. Having
recently struggled through the user manual as a non-technical user, I
agree that such instructions are necessary, so I am taking a stab at
writing them by describing, step by step, how I installed wlanpoke on my
three Squeezebox Radios. If anyone notices any problems with my
instructions, please let us know. I'm afraid that most non-technical
users may have given up on their Radios by now, but I hope these
instructions help someone.
Please note that these instructions are for installing the fix without
enabling the logging (extensively documented in the user manual) that it
provides for troubleshooting purposes. I chose to disable the logging in
the hope that the fix would simply work. Since it does, I don't
anticipate having to enable logging.
Now for the instructions. I used a Windows computer on the same Wi-Fi
network as my Squeezebox Radios to do the following:
1. Download wlanpoke: Go to https://github.com/PomDev2/wlanpoke , click
on the green button labeled Code and then click on Download ZIP. Save
the file wlanpoke-main.zip to your computer.
2. Open Windows Explorer and locate the downloaded file
wlanpoke-main.zip. Right-click on the file, and select "Extract All".
This will extract the contents of the compressed file to a folder named
wlanpoke-main.
3. Enable the Radio's SSH server by navigating as follows:
Home | Settings | Advanced | Remote Login
and selecting Enable SSH. When you do this, make a note of the Radio's
IP address, which is displayed on the screen in the following message:
"The root password for this device is 1234 and you can connect to it on
address [IP address]"
4. Back on your computer, download WinSCP from the page
https://winscp.net/eng/download.php and install it.
5. Launch WinSCP. A login window should open (if you need to open a
login window manually, click on the "New Session" tab toward the top
left). Under Session, for the file protocol, choose SCP. For the host
name, enter the IP address you saved in step 2. Leave the port number
unchanged. For user name, enter "root". For password, enter "1234".
Click on "Login". You will see one or two warnings asking if you want to
proceed. Answer Yes. If you get an error message that says "Error
getting name of current remote directory," dismiss it by clicking OK.
6. The WinSCP window now displays your computer's files and folders on
the left and your Squeezebox Radio's files on the right. On the
Squeezebox Radio side, navigate to the root directory (the folder at the
very top of the hierarchy). You can do this by clicking on the root
directory button that is shown above the list of files, to the left of
the home button. Now, navigate to the folder named "etc" by
double-clicking on it. Now click on the New button, which is just below
and to the right of the root directory button. Choose "Directory", and
for "New folder name", type "wlanpoke". Once the wlanpoke folder has
been created, double-click on it to display the contents of the folder,
i.e. nothing as of yet.
7. In your computer files (displayed on the left-hand side of WinSCP),
navigate to the contents of the folder wlanpoke-main, created in step 2.
Select all 11 files and drag them to the opposite side of the WinSCP
window to copy them into the wlanpoke folder. (Answer yes and/or OK to
any scary-sounding confirmations.)
8. The purpose of this step is to change permissions for the shell
scripts to "executable". In the menu bar at the top of the WinSCP
window, click on Commands, and then click on Open Terminal. Then, for
each of the following two lines of text, copy the entire string of text,
paste it into the field labeled "Enter Command" in the console, and
click on the Execute button:
chmod 755 /etc/wlanpoke/*.sh
chmod 755 /etc/wlanpoke/rcS.local.example
9. Click on Close to close the terminal window. The Squeezebox Radio
side of the WinRCS window should still show the contents of the wlanpoke
folder. Right-click on the file rcS.local.example and click on Copy.
Next, n
