Re: Weird Wifi problem Pi Zero W

On 25/08/2024 11:07, mm0fmf wrote:

I have a Pi Zero W with a weird Wifi issue.

The Pi runs an SSH gateway and is powered from a USB port on the router.
It's been running faultlessly for about 2years now with a few tweaks to
the standard setup to mount regularly written to files on a ramdisk to
preserve the SDcard. The system reboots every 24hrs as a simple way of
stopping the ramdisk  filling up.

Rebooting is always has a risk of failure, so I suggest looking in to
cleaning out the RAM disc using a cron job. logrotate is very useful.

My original Raspberry Pi in the shed (Pi B 256MB with WiFi dongle) used
to have a poor signal which seemed to degrade over time, so I put it
only a daily reboot, and it got less and less reliable reconnecting and
often just wouldn't come back up without a power cycle, so I stopped
that. Turns out it was the WiFi dongle, problem went away when I
upgraded to a Pi 3 with it's own WiFi.

After a new router was installed, this Pi has issues connecting to Wifi.

Power it up and there's a 75% chance it will connect. If it doesn't
removing and reapplying power makes it likely to connect. If you reboot
it from the command line it fails to connect most times.

I have a spare Pi Zero W and swapped the SDcard into the spare. Connects
every time on reboot or on power-cycle. I place another SDcard in the
intermittent one and the same Wifi connection problem exists. One card
is Debian 12 with NetworkManager and one is Debian 11 with old style
networking setup.

The fault moves with the Pi and doesn't seem to be software dependent.

It does sound like that Pi is at fault, and maybe you should retire it,
or move it to other duties. Pi zeros are cheap, so is not great loss.

I did have reliability problems with two camera Pi Zeros a couple of
years ago when if the router rebooted (including when you changed the
configuration), they wouldn't reconnect and had to be power cycled. But
that did turn out to be software, as it stopped at some point and the
are still working fine to this day.

Using Debian 12 and checking with a USB Ethernet connection the Wifi
fails with "could not activate connection: Activation failed: secrets
were required but not provided" even though the password is set and has
connected.

That's not something I've seen before.

---druck