BB1 Newbie question about WiFi passwords

[Peter Garner]

Hi All, 

Just received my wonderful BB1 yesterday and am just getting used to it. I had great "fun" with setting up the WiFi. I have a 

Vigor router which supports up to 4 SSIDs and the good news is that the BB1 found them all without a fuss. The bad news 

is that 2 of the SSIDs I can use have passwords containing double quotes and semi-colons, neither of which are supported 

on the BB1. For now I've had to use another SSID that doesn't have a password containing those characters.

So, being a Raspberry Pi geek, I copied the SD card via the menu to a USB stick and had a look at the wireless config file. I

then compared it to a similar, working config on one of my Pi's which is shown below (SSID and passwords changed!):

cat /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
country=GB
network={
        ssid="StayAtHome"
        psk="Top_secret-"password";"
}

So how does this sound for a fix?

1. copy the factory SD card to another via the menu;

2. edit wpa_supplicant.conf to add my desired SSID and password;

3. Install this is as the new SD card in the BB1.

I saw the warning in the factory config file about "being overwritten by b2.c", so I'd appreciate some advice here.

Many thanks, Peter

Software version BB1 Mar 18 2020 14:06:02

[Peter Lowham]

Hi Peter,

With regard to the 'being overwritten by b2.c' message, I have worked at modifying some of the BB1 (& B2) low level files.  I have found that some of my attempts have worked successfully, some have not.  From what I can see, when the BB1 (or B2) is rebooted, a number of the configuration files are rebuilt during the reboot from a set of 'shadow' files and therefore some manually edited changes will be lost during a reboot.

The 'b2' module seems to be the centre of the Brennan so that migt go some way to explaining the message.

As successful example of a change is that I have made changes to the '/etc/samba/smb.conf' file om my BB1 and B2 to enable smb presentation of additional directories, and these changes have been functioning without problems, so far.

Good luck with your BB1.  They are great devices!!

Regards,

Peter.

[Peter Garner]

Thanks for that Peter. I have a 128Gb card coming soon and will try out my hack when it arrives. If all else fails i'll still have my original SD card to fall back on.

[Peter Garner]

This is now fixed. I've managed to get the BB1 connected to one of my SSIDs that has double quotes in the password. So 

here's what I did.

1. I copied the original SD card to my new 128Gb SD card using the menu option;

2. I put the new card into a card reader on a Linux computer and edited the /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf;

3. I then added SSIDs 3 and 4, put the new card back in tn the radio and started it up.

4. It connected to My_SSID_2 successfully, even though there were double quotes in the password.

However, on subsequent examination out of the radio, the startup had deleted references to SSIDs 3 and 4, 

as per the commented warning at the start! 

So I am now able to use the radio on the desired SSID with a password containing non-supported characters. 

Hopefully this will be useful to anyone having similar problems!

# all lines after the first occurence of "network" will be discarded

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

update_config=1

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

update_config=1

network={

        ssid="My_SSID_2"

        psk="Super-secret-"password"!"

network={

        ssid="My_SSID_3"

        psk="Super-secret-"password"!"

network={

        ssid="My_SSID_4"

        psk="Super-secret-"password"!"