[SOLVED] Network connectivity problem due to Wifi channels

[Asha7]

Heya,

I made this forum account to post about my network problem with my moOde server, but I've already solved it. So I thought I'd post about it anyways since that might help out other users who experience similar issues.

I installed moOde on an RPi 2 with a BossDAC Hat and after some configuration everything worked smoothly. But a few days later my server was no longer connected to the Wifi. Router logs showed that it had last connected at 2:45am the night before and not again since. Restarting the server did nothing to fix this and I ended up wiping the SD card and reinstalling it. And the same thing happened again. I was busy with other things and just left the server in its broken state when it randomly reconnected to the Wifi a few days later.

Long story short, my router had a default setting configured where it would automatically change Wifi channels, based on which ones were already occupied by other Wifi networks. Now I imagine that with this type of default setting and neighbors surrounding you it's quite common that the Wifi channel will switch every now and then. This is what caused the moOde server to disconnect, and it would reconnect when my router went back to the Wifi channel it had originally connected to.

So the obvious solution was disabling this setting and setting a fixed channel; my server has not disconnected since (it's been around 10 days I think). It does make me wonder though if it would be possible to configure the server so that it can find the Wifi network even when channels change, as other devices seem to have no problems with that.

Hope this helps someone.

Asha

[Tim Curtis]

Thats interesting. AFAIK the client WiFi stack should automatically switch to the new channel.

I'll investigate.

[Asha7]

Since you're investigating I'll add some more information that may or may not be relevant. At home I run a Wifi mesh network with multiple access points, but all with the same SSID and password. From its position the music server can see two access points, but only one of them has enough signal strength to do anything with in the room its in. It might be possible that server attempted to connect to the AP with unusable signal strength after a channel change of the AP it originally connected to, just speculating

[the_bertrum]

I had exactly this with my VirginMedia Hub3. It's "smart wifi" would swap channels which wasn't an issue with anything on my network apart from my single Pi3A+. That would loose then re-acquire the connection, but mDNS was always screwed and I had to reboot to see the player again.