On 25 August 2017 at 12:27, Stewart C. Russell via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

Is that latest-latest Raspbian, as in Raspbian Stretch released last

week? It has some known networking issues that the Raspbian devs have

been a bit coy about addressing.

That's the one, and thanks for the heads-up.

The Foundation's current official response is along the lines of "It

works if you set it up with keyboard and monitor", but if you're doing a

headless setup, that doesn't help.

... and headless is the intended use.

What worked for me was ensuring that
wpa-supplicant.conf had the following lines at the top, even if you're
working on the skeleton version copied from /boot

country=CA
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1

Was all there, exactly like that. But iwconfig and other tools didn't even indicate that the install got as far as the WPA setup.

Like all Raspberry Pi things, don't follow web advice more than a year

old.

I suspected as much. Many sites were giving really complex rebuilding steps for a driver that's supposedly already there. Unfortunately the most recent forum stuff that I could on this is from 2015.

Working with anything other than Realtek USB wifi on a

Raspberry Pi can be a crapshoot at the best of times.

I'm seeing that the more I read. Considering the low cost of entry I think it's just the path of least resistance to switch to that.

One last thing. I'm using a 2A USB power supply for the Pi B; I hope that's enough. Some previous forum advice suggests that some dongles need a separate powered USB hub which I don't have.

Thanks, Stewart and Russell, for the help.

- Evan