Lost wifi connection with BalenaSound on pi4

I had balena sound running fine for months on a raspberry pi4 and suddenly it stopping working yesterday. All other devices are working fine on my network wired and wireless.The balena dashboard said the app was offline so i tried going through the process a couple more times of deleting the app making a new one and triple checking the SSID and passphrase were correct. It will connect if I plug in via ethernet. When I plug in a monitor when it is on wifi it boots to a white screen with the balena logo. How should I begin to troubleshoot this further?
Thank you for your time!

Hey @gtodd876, welcome to balena forums!

Sounds like the issue is specific to wifi connection. Then I’d still suggest to start to troubleshoot when the device is connected over ethernet. So please open the Device Diagnostics menu to run diagnostics. Please note if you see any issues here. It’s helpful to rule out other types of issues and focus on the wifi.

Next, can you ssh to Host OS and run nmcli d wifi list?
You can use balena dashboard to open SSH connection to the device.

This command will list the wifi networks in the device’s range. Do you see your wifi listed fine with sufficient signal strength?

If these are fine, it’d be good to reproduce the issue and look into the device logs. So at this point I’d suggest unplugging the ethernet cable and wait for the device to go offline. Since you configured wifi already, the device is supposed to connect to the wireless network when the cable is unplugged. As the device doesn’t come online after 5 minutes or so, let’s plug the ethernet cable back for the device and wait for the device to come online. Then on Host OS, let’s run dmesg and journalctl -u NetworkManager --no-pager to see the errors.

Cheers…

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Thank you so much for the great info! I do see the wifi listed fine with sufficient signal strength. This looks like section in the network manager log where i unplug ethernet but I’m not sure what to do with the info:

Jan 08 16:00:44 4312058 NetworkManager[1517]: <info>  [1610121644.6150] device (eth0): state change: activated -> unavailable (reason 'carrier-changed', sys-iface-state: 'managed')
Jan 08 16:00:44 4312058 NetworkManager[1517]: <info>  [1610121644.6153] dhcp4 (eth0): canceled DHCP transaction
Jan 08 16:00:44 4312058 NetworkManager[1517]: <info>  [1610121644.6154] dhcp4 (eth0): state changed bound -> done
Jan 08 16:00:44 4312058 NetworkManager[1517]: <info>  [1610121644.6398] dns-mgr: Removing DNS information from /sbin/resolvconf
Jan 08 16:00:44 4312058 NetworkManager[1517]: <info>  [1610121644.6609] manager: NetworkManager state is now CONNECTED_LOCAL
Jan 08 16:03:27 4312058 NetworkManager[1517]: <info>  [1610121807.6542] device (wlan0): set-hw-addr: set MAC address to 1E:3A:EF:E7:75:50 (scanning)
Jan 08 16:03:27 4312058 NetworkManager[1517]: <info>  [1610121807.6679] device (wlan0): supplicant interface state: ready -> disconnected
Jan 08 16:03:27 4312058 NetworkManager[1517]: <info>  [1610121807.6682] device (wlan0): supplicant interface state: disconnected -> inactive
Jan 08 16:08:43 4312058 NetworkManager[1517]: <info>  [1610122123.6877] device (wlan0): set-hw-addr: set MAC address to FA:EA:58:20:3B:FF (scanning)
Jan 08 16:08:43 4312058 NetworkManager[1517]: <info>  [1610122123.7097] device (wlan0): supplicant interface state: inactive -> disconnected
Jan 08 16:08:43 4312058 NetworkManager[1517]: <info>  [1610122123.7100] device (wlan0): supplicant interface state: disconnected -> inactive

Todd, you are correct, those logs show the device is not connecting to WiFi. A couple of thoughts here…

Interestingly, if the WiFi is identified by nmcli d wifi list, then perhaps try nmcli d wifi connect WIFINETWORKNAMEHERE password PASSWORDGOESHERE (obviously replacing the network name and password values) and see what happens.

Another item to check is to log into your WiFi router and ensure there is nothing blocking or preventing the Pi from connecting (blacklisted IP Addresses, etc.).

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after running nmcli d wifi list I see my wifi SSID listed but it’s the second in the list after a Wyze device. That shouldn’t matter right as long as my SSID is correct?

after running this i got:
Device 'wlan0' successfully activated with 'a58e405d-fdc2-3649-9339-5bbaea740c76'

which confuses me even more :slight_smile:

I’ll recheck my router settings … Let me know if there’s anything else I can do. Thanks again for all your help!

The order of the networks being shown does not matter, no.

I think that means you might be on WiFi again…Is the device now showing up in balenaCloud? (Leave ethernet unplugged).

It is online now in Balena dashboard!

Now the issue is that I don’t see balenasound as an output option in spotify, youtube music etc… Are the some good commands I can use to troubleshoot that?

At this point, reboot the device. Let’s see if the resulting restart of the balenaSound containers are enough to get things back in action for you.

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It’s working! Thank you!

Excellent, glad to hear!