RESOLVED: N9 Wifi Connectivity Problem
 

Hi there! I received a free N9 at a software developers conference late last year. I'd like to use it instead of my old iphone which is getting long in the tooth. I do not have a sim card for the N9 yet: I am hoping to play with it awhile and see how I like it before I commit to a celphone service contract and spend money on it.

I am trying to get this N9 to talk on my wifi network at home, and the N9 seems to connect to our WAP, but it only intermittently loads webpages. I can get google to come up (sometimes) but usually it just never loads webpages.

All our other devices (2 windows pcs, 2 linux boxes, a mac mini, 2 iphones and a roku device) all talk on our network just fine. We use a D-Link DIR-655 WAP/Firewall. We have MAC filtering enabled, and I added the N9 MAC address to the permitted devices list. I also tried disabling MAC filtering so that the DIR-655 will talk to any device regardless of MAC address, but I still have the problem.

We are using WPA, and the N9 has the shared key, and when I try to connect to internet manually, it seems to connect to our wifi SSID with no error messages and I see the blue wifi active icon in the top left corner of the N9 screen. The Settings > Internet Connections screen shows "Connected".

On the DIR-655, the N9 shows as connected: I see it's MAC address in the "Connected Wifi Devices" list. I have configured the WAP to reserve 192.168.0.100 for this N9, and it seems to be getting that IP address.

Router (D-Link DIR-655) wifi connected devices status page shows:


I try to ping 192.168.0.100 from cygwin shell on my pc, and it looks like there is no route:

...however netstat -rn on my pc shows a route for 192.168:

...and I can ping other devices on 192.168 just fine.

Something is wrong somewhere. I've been fiddling with this for a few hours now, and my problem is that I can't ssh into the N9 to try to see what's going on. Since I have no internet connectivity from the phone, I can't download diagnostic tools. I looked for xterm on the N9 or some other way to get more info from within the phone, but this is a vanilla phone with just the factory installed apps. I even tried opening 127.0.0.1 in the N9 web browser hoping there might be some administrative interface, but there wasn't. The N9 appears to be operating normally in other respects.

I would think that TCP/IP should work without the phone having a sim card in it, but could that be part of the problem? Do I need to have a sim card for TCP/IP networking to work on the N9?

Any help here would be appreciated, and sorry for the length of this post!

Re: N9 Wifi Connectivity Problem
 

Hm, I disabled WPA on our wifi router, and I can ping the N9 now, so it looks like I must have encryption misconfigured, either on our router or on the N9. I'll look at that some more, but encryption has been working fine for all the rest of our hosts and devices.

I'm also getting "security certificate not trusted" popups for google... I seem to be able to get to some websites now, but not others from the N9. I can get to anything on the internet fine from our PCs... hm puzzling!

I'd like to resolve this because the N9 seems like an awesome phone, and I'd like to play with Qt development on it too! :-)

Re: N9 Wifi Connectivity Problem
 

I created an account on store.ovi.com and I can login from my pc, but when I try to download fingerterm from the N9 browser, and enter my ovi.com account info, it says "Unknown error occurred -- check time settings."

I'm getting a sneaking feeling that putting a sim card in this phone might make a difference. Gotta check the old phone drawer and see if I have one lying around!...

Re: N9 Wifi Connectivity Problem
 

I have an N9 without SIM, works fine with numerous WiFi APs including N class, so you definitely don't need the SIM for TCP/IP to work.

You mentioned the blue wifi active icon, It's not staying blue is it? It only turns blue briefly while connecting, then it turns white when fully connected. If it stays blue I think that would mean it's contacted the AP but still working out a connection.

Re: N9 Wifi Connectivity Problem
 

Another problem could come from the SPI firewall on the D-link 655, It has both an SPI and NAT firewall. Try temporarily turning off the SPI firewall to see if that helps, if that solves the problem, you can turn it back on and maybe look at the SPI logging on the d-link 655 to see if it offers any clues.

Re: N9 Wifi Connectivity Problem
 

Sim card is no issue, running the n950 without sim on my Wifi for the last month.

My feeling is that there is the encryption issue between router and the device that is causing the problem. I had this too at one stage. Try using WEP momentarily to see if it is WPA causing the problem

Re: N9 Wifi Connectivity Problem
 

Thank you kindly for the replies! :-D

Wifi appears to be working now. On my hardware firewall/router, I changed encryption from auto-detect to WPA2-only and that seems to have done the trick.

I couldn't get into the ovi store, because it seems to want the sim card in. So I dug up our old iPhone that got dropped and bricked a couple years ago, and popped out the sim card. But the N9 takes microsim!

So a little googling and i found youtube videos for cutting an older, larger sim down to micro size. Got out the sheetmetal snips, and chopped that bad boy down, and on the first try I had it in backwards. But flipped it around, and the N9 went through the sim provisioning and ovi registration dialogs.

But I still couldn't get in to the ovi store to download fingerterm. It kept complaining of "Unknown error--check time settings." Using the deductive power I was able to summon by engaging my lazy brain, I went and checked the time settings and ah-ha! I had it set to Feb 26, 2011! So apparently the ovi store wants to see that the phone is sane with respect to the year before it will let it login.

I am now trying to download fingerterm. The download process starts, and I am not getting the error I was before, but the download never finishes. But that's OK, I'm hitting web pages now, can ping the N9. I am going to try turning on Developer mode, and maybe I will be able to ssh into the N9 now.

So it looks like my original problem is resolved! Yay! Thanks so much for the quick responses and helpful info from everybody who replied! Great community here! :-D

Re: N9 Wifi Connectivity Problem
 

Yes you are right, it was only staying blue a moment, and it is now white. Thanks for pointing that out! :-)

Re: N9 Wifi Connectivity Problem
 

I wonder is your router still showing you connected at wireless N 2.4 Ghz or does it now show 5Ghz?

I think WPA2 is needed for 5Ghz mode to be available, so if you were using WPA previously, it might be a problem with the N9 and your router and 2.4Ghz mode wireless N.

Re: N9 Wifi Connectivity Problem
 

It still says 2.4Ghz for this device. However there is some 802.11b device on there, maybe my old iPhone, so I will have to figure out what that older wifi device is. Maybe that is causing the WAP to degrade to a slower speed.

Still having trouble downloading apps from ovi... i get into the app store ok, and appear to be logged in, but when i try to download apps, the "busy" spinner just spins and never times out or completes.

But that could be a server side thing. My suspicion is that maybe because there is no phone number bound to this phone, that the app store isn't able to complete the download. But I'm off to look into adding this phone to our cel plan! Yeeha!

Thanks again for taking the time to help out pataphysician (and MFaroTusino also)!

Re: N9 Wifi Connectivity Problem
 

I'm not sure on the OVI store, I use the same OVI account as my n900 which has a SIM, so I can't say for certain OVI doesn't need a SIM, it might very well. Have you Tried to make an OVI Store Account, you definitely need one to download.

Re: N9 Wifi Connectivity Problem
 

Yep, I created an ovi account and get in there fine on my pc. I also appear to login ok to ovi from the N9, it's just that the downloads don't complete. But that's ok, I'm just happy I got this networking issue resolved. :-D If having the year wrong caused the ovi store to refuse the N9 connection, I'm thinking that not having a phone number is probably the problem there. Once I get the phone on our cel plan, I'll be "in the system" and can submit support requests to the ovi store, so I'm not too worried about that problem.

Gotta move on to other tasks here, but thanks again for taking the time to help out, it really is appreciated. Have a great day pataphysician! :-D

Re: RESOLVED: N9 Wifi Connectivity Problem
 

LOL well I turned on developer mode and after it rebooted, despite saying "SIM card is not provisioned MM#2", it now downloads stuff from the ovi app store! :-D It responds to ssh although I have to figure out credentials, but no biggie. Check out top running on my phone!! LOL:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/101862...79739119/posts

Re: RESOLVED: N9 Wifi Connectivity Problem
 

I can not say I have experienced your Wifi security issues, I can say I have noticed my N9 can not see or connect to my router (Asus RT-N56U) if it is broadcasting on any channel higher than 11 on 2.4ghz. I have tried channels 12 + 13 to reduce interference (I live in a large apartment complex), my Apple TV and laptop will connect but my N9 will not :(

Re: RESOLVED: N9 Wifi Connectivity Problem
 

Tibere86, well you could turn your apartment into a big Tempest Room, but your friends might think you were odd for having aluminum foil all over your walls. :-)

Based on my experience described above, you might check your router and see if it is auto-selecting the encryption sheme, and if so, you might set it to WPA2-only. From my experience, I have the impression that the N9 may not happily be able to deal with the way these WAPs negotiate the encryption scheme, that is, in my case, the problem wasn't reception or signal strength (which was my first guess) but rather a communications protocol problem. Maybe your N9 is having the same problem.

It might not help you, but it's worth a little poking around and experimenting with. :-) Hope you get it worked out!