More WiFi mischief in Bookworm

Same problem with a Pi Zero 2W Rev 1 Bookworm. I check the link every minute and restart NetworkManager if link not there. It happens once or twice a day, but sometimes up to 4 times. No regularity to it, though. No problems with Pi3B+ on same circuit.

I have a wi-fi card in an older (Core i7) machine, running hostapd. That works fine, unless I transfer multi-gigabytes of data to my laptop. That gets the wi-fi into a stalled state. At that point I remember I shouldn’t have done that, and switch to an Ethernet connection to continue the transfer.

When I try again some hours later, the wi-fi seems to have cleared its trouble.

Not sure if this is related, but just thought I’d mention it; are you transferring lots of data?

Generally, the problem seemed load independent.

I say "seemed" because shortly after posting my gripe I went back to the Pi and tried to run ifconfig wlan0 up, whereupon the response was "...prohibited by rfkill..". That I recognized as a localization problem. I hadn't changed localization, it must have been an update.

I'd previously suspected as much and gone through the hoops of setting country, keyboard, wifi, etc. more than once to no avail, but I did it again and this time the wifi started working.

In the meantime I've moved the Pi5 to a location that allows wired networking. It's much less convenient, but for now I'll keep it there.

Thanks for writing!

bob prohaska

I have a period in my SSID pasword and all my Pis work fine

I had a Pi zero problem that sounds suspiciously like this. A better PSU made it disappear.

I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of Pis loaded up with whatever are now actually on the limit with respect to PSU current. Wifi takes a lot of power when actually transmitting data.

Friend had a Pi5 that wouldn't connect to his disk, via USB but would connect to mine.

Powered hub sorted it...

When building a Phoniebox for one of our grandchildren, I learned about the "wpa_passphrase" command. It generates a 256-bit PSK from the SSID and the ASCII passphrase and dumps it as a hex string, eg

$ wpa_passphrase abc defghijkl network={ ssid="abc" #psk="defghijkl" psk=6db784a0ea8130c5ff07e690923f9af50cfea5c0776b607bea9bc4478c41f8dd }

This should a) get rid of any special character issues b) speed up the connection establishment.

I successfully tried it on my kubuntu laptop as well.

Josef

In the course of exploring the wifi problems I moved the Pi5 to a new location where it could use a wired ethernet connection. On reboot I saw a message saying that "USB booting requires a 5V 5A power supply" or words to that effect. I think the message is new, it's unclear if it's a warning or merely informational. At the same time I added a

Right now there's a voltmeter connected to the ground and +5V pins on the GPIO header, Wifi is on, the meter reads 5.08V. Turning wifi off seems to make no difference. Turning wifi back on caused a momentary dip to 5.06V which recovered within one second.

If that's a PSU problem it's mighty subtle.

Thanks for writing!

bob prohaska

It should not have dipped *at all*

Have you got a storage scope you can put on it?

My guess - without massive confidence - is that there is a momentary brownout of a lot less than 5.06V.

I've had far more problems with Bookworm since it moved to Network Manager than with Bullseye and dhcpcd. I had to wind back a unpdate to one and only one of my Pi 5s at the beginning of the year, due to unreliability, but whatever it was went away at the next update. Luckily I have two root partitions on the nvme, so I can upgrade and keep the previous available with a simple edit of cmdline.txt

Although it's not the problem you are seeing on the Pi 5, after the update I did at the beginning of May two of my Pi's overnight rsync backups went from taking a few tens of seconds, to anything from minutes to 5 hours.

I suspected the WiFi, SD cards, power supplies or even the machines themselves. After trying many combinations of those things, the common factor was they were the only two ones on Bookworm with 512MB of RAM, everything else having 1GB or more. One was a Pi Zero 2W which started taking minutes to backup, and the Pi 3A+ would hang for hours. I have lot's of 512MB Pi Zero Ws but they have cameras so are still on Bullseye so they can use RaspImjpeg with the legacy camera sack, and don't have any problems.

The only way around it was to go back to using the old Bullseye image on the 3A+, and dig out one of the old 1MBs Pi 2B to replace the Zero 2W. The backups went back to taking 20 to 30 seconds. At the next round of upgrades (I only tend to do it a couple of times a year), I'll try the original configurations with Bullseye again.

---druck

Well, ten millivolts isn't much and nothing's perfect.

Yes, but it's an Owon USB 'scope so a bit of a circus to hook up. When I get the present crop of alligators fed I'll give it a try. For now wired networking is good enough.

A very reasonable suspicion.

Thanks for writing!

bob prohaska

And, a good call.

Found a spare usb-c power supply and tried it. 5.45 volts on the GPIO pins. That seems kinda high, but the Pi5 seems happy with it. It does grumble something about usb_max_current_limits during the boot output but doesn't put the info in dmesg, so it's hard to act on it. Something about messing with config.txt, but after all the trouble of the past few days I'm just glad it boots.

Still having trouble getting dual monitors working, but that's a subject for a new thread.

Thanks very much for writing!

bob prohaska

If its role is to be a server box, then configure it with a static IP and other network settings, and get rid of Network Manager, dhcpcd and all the rest of that client-side stuff. Much less trouble that way.

Amen to that!

You can use network manager to do all that via the command line. Its not hard

Its easier than trying to resurrect older style netconfigs that will get wiped out by upgrades

I do on the headless ones, and there are less problems.

---druck

I have the older style /etc/network/interfaces file going back several years on this machine I’m using now, and on my backup. Both run Debian Unstable and undergo upgrades about once a month. I’ve never had to “resurrect” that file from an upgrade; once or twice NetworkManager does come back (tied to some dependency on the GUI desktop), but I quickly remove that and all is well.