RPi Booting But Not Visible To Wifi

Onorio_Catenacci · November 3, 2021, 4:32pm

I am trying to get Raspberry Pi working with Channels installed on an external SSD. As far as I can tell everything is starting correctly (at least I don't see any obvious error messages) yet when I attempt to connect to either http://dvr-server or http://dvr-server.local I can't reach either of them. It appears as if the Wifi isn't able to resolve the hostname but I'm not totally sure.

Any suggestions of what I might check to figure out what's wrong? I have hooked the RPi directly to the router and that doesn't seem to help.

I used the Raspberry Pi Imager 1.6.2 to place the image on the SSD. I placed the ChannelsDVRServer_PI4.img.xz image on the SSD.

I also burned that image to a USB drive and that also seems to boot the RPi but again the RPi doesn't seem to be available on my Wifi.

Again, if anyone can suggest troubleshooting steps to fix this I'd appreciate it! I can hook the RPi directly in to the router and then hook up an external keyboard/video/mouse but as I say when I hooked it up before there was no indication of any sort of problem.

tmm1 · November 3, 2021, 4:44pm

It has to be hooked up to Ethernet.

If you really want WiFi then you would attach a keyboard and use nmcli to set it up.

racameron · November 3, 2021, 4:46pm

WiFi is not configured at boot, only Ethernet. (WiFi isn't great for a DVR, as the latency can be quite low, and other congestion/interference issues.)

If you really want WiFi, here's the documentation for changing the networking on the RPi image:

github.com

fancybits/operating-system/blob/dev-fancybits/Documentation/network.md

# Network

Home Assistant Operating System uses NetworkManager to control the host network.

## Configure network

By default the device will be in DHCP state.

Basic network settings can be set through the Supervisor frontend in the System
tab. Advanced configurations such as VLAN are also available through the
`ha network` CLI command.

To restore the default configuration the `ha network` CLI command can be used as
well:

```
ha network update default --ipv4-method auto
```

If more advanced network settings are required network connection files can be

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Onorio_Catenacci · November 3, 2021, 5:53pm

So I need to direct connect it to one of the ethernet ports on my wifi router then?

racameron · November 3, 2021, 5:55pm

Yes. Or attach a keyboard and monitor to manually setup networking. But wired directly to the network is the best option.

Onorio_Catenacci · November 3, 2021, 8:58pm

Is there any way to VNC into the image? Given that I can't seem to see the server VNC'ing in won't help but once I get past this issue it would be handy to be able to look at it via VNC sometimes.

racameron · November 3, 2021, 9:05pm

The server's interface is via the web UI. Navigate to http://X.X.X.X:8089 to access the server. While there is no VNC, there is SSH. The configuration document tells you how to enable access on port 22222: put the public key of your keypair into a file called authorized_keys in the CONFIG folder of the drive.

tmm1 · November 3, 2021, 9:07pm

You can enable SSH access directly from the DVR web UI now

Onorio_Catenacci · November 4, 2021, 12:58pm

For whatever reason the ethernet port on the RPi doesn't seem to be working. I mean I booted back to the RPi OS and directly connected it to the router via ethernet and the router doesn't see the RPi.

I did some digging to see if I could find anything about enabling ethernet on the RPi but so far nada. But I think that's the issue in this case. I wish I could figure out how to check the ethernet port is actually functioning at all but, as I say, so far no luck.

Thanks for all your assistance with this!