Headless Persistent Wifi

Robotics & Edge Computing Jetson & Embedded Systems Jetson TX2
1

I’m having significant issues setting up a persistent wifi connection on a headless TX2 setup. Here are the steps I’ve taken:

  1. Flash TX2 w/ Jetpack 3.3.
  2. Plug TX2 into router via ethernet. Connection works and IP assigned via DHCP from router.
  3. SSH into TX2.
  4. Set the following in my /etc/network/interfaces (and yes wpa_supplicant is installed and running in background)
auto wlan0
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-ssid "MYSSID"
wpa-psk "MYASCIIPASSWORD"
  1. If I restart networking.service, the wifi connection does not connect.
  2. If I restart the TX2, the wifi connection does not work, and now SSH refuses connection via ethernet and I have to reflash.

Does anybody have any insight as to what is going on here? Is network manager somehow interfering? Is the fact that I have the TX2 connected via ethernet and (attempting) wifi at the same time?

I’m currently at work, but can post dmesg logs if that would be helpful. Thanks so much!

2

I’m not sure about a solution using /etc/network/interfaces but nmcli worked for us.

nmcli d wifi connect "SSID" password "PASSWORD"
3

I’ll try nmcli to see if I can connect at all… but ultimately I need to go with /etc/network/interfaces because I need to configure the TX2 as a gateway.

Anybody know why the standard /etc/network/interfaces configuration wouldn’t work? I have a raspberry pi 3 with integrated wifi, and used the same exact configuration on both systems. It works on the raspberry pi, and not on the TX2.

4

I couldn’t tell you where the “glue” is, but some devices are set up for management by NetworkManager, others are not. When not managed by NM, the standard directory editing should work. You probably should investigate what files NM uses for config and also check how to determine if an interface is managed by NM or not.