My ever-faithful Apple Airport Extreme decided to give up the ghost about a week ago. I was forced to use the built-in WiFi in my Verizon router as a temporary replacement. Of course that meant that all the WiFi based devices in my house that expected to find the Apple router were off-line until I updated them with the revised WiFi info for the new router. That included my NTP Clock.
If it weren’t for a power failure a couple of days ago, I might not have noticed it, as the clock gradually drifted out of synch. But that power failure caught my attention when it was displaying the message “Waiting 4 WiFi”.
No problem, I thought, I’ll just plug in the HDMI connector, keyboard and mouse and update things using X-Windows. Oops, my clock is based on a Model A with no Ethernet Jack and only one USB connector. Briefly I entertained the though of a SSH connection, until it dawned on me that was dependent on the WiFi connection too.
Still no problem, powered USB hub to the rescue. Keyboard, Mouse, and WiFi dongle plug into that, and the hub plugs into the RPi. Sure enough, rebooting the device presented me with the lovely screen of loading modules followed by a login prompt.
User and Password entered, and then “startx” at the command line and I was running X-Windows. Double Click on the WiFi setting app, delete the old network info, and add in the new, and I was all set.
After shutting down the RPI and allowing it to reboot, it now joined my new WiFi network and was showing accurate time again after the next minute tick of the clock.
Moral of the story: Sometimes things just work and keep working for years. Then something goes bump in the night and stuff breaks. Everything you take for granted as always working doesn’t anymore.
Someday I need to move the Network Settings into the user interface of the clock, but that sounds messy.
