I has an odd situation last week where my Cerbo GX appeared to have disabled its wi-fi access point. It happened whilst nobody was on board the boat to which it’s fitted, but my VRM data stopped being sent when it happened. I since discovered that there is a recessed button on the device to enable/disable wi-fi which I pressed and it came back on line. Why would that have happened? Clearly not by accident as nobody was there and I didn’t even know the switch existed until it was already off.
I’ve since been looking at remote console and see that there are some Red text entries. One against Modifications loaded at boot saying “Yes (rcS.Local)” , and one against Firmware integrity (state of root-fs) saying, “Modified”
It is running V3.63 and I’ve not tried to flash firmware. Given that I am remote, I am loathe to try reinstalling the firmware using the provided button in case I get some other odd behavior where it turns the wi-fi off again. Any ideas if this is risky or safe to do remotely, and what may have caused it in the first place?
Somebody, maybe ages ago installed mods for you. Most commonly it is guimods and setuphelper, which aren’t compatible with current versions.
It is never a good idea to make major changes or apply updates remotely.
The reset option in the modifications checks will restore settings like wifi etc and it does work fine, but there is always a risk so it pays to be careful.
Ah ok Nick, thank you. It was me who installed guimods some time ago, but I didn’t realise that would affect the firmware status, and I hardly ever look at remote console to notice the “error”. I thought it was just an app running on top of the base firmware, but as long as this is the cause of the message I’ll leave it as is. I did wonder if it was a corruption that caused my Wi-Fi to go off but seems unlikely then. Really no idea what caused that but so far a one off in 3 years so I’ll watch this space.
Thanks again
Mods make changes to the OS, so if they aren’t updated along with the GX (preferably before updating the GX) it can completely break the OS when the two are no longer compatible.
I have seen wifi adapter disappear and wifi stop working on non modified GX units. issues is fixed with a reboot, you can automate this in settings- VRM portal - reboot when no contact
Interesting. When I first discovered the Wi-Fi light flashing I connected via Bluetooth and saw that the correct ssid was still selected, but the access point disabled. Not knowing about the recessed button at that juncture I cycled the power assuming this would force a reboot. When it completed its restart the AP was still disabled. It was at that point I read the manual and found out about the button, which did restart the connection. So with that in mind do you still think that an auto reboot might have worked? Surely the power cycle should have done it if that be the case?
As I said, it’s once in 3 years which isn’t bad, but when you live 120 miles away it’s pretty inconvenient. Watch this space I guess but it can’t hurt to enable auto reboot when offline
Thanks for the suggestion.