[Server-devel] IIAB 6.6 PREVIEW 4, helping to diagnose Raspberry Pi hotspot "disappearances"

[Adam Holt]

IIAB 6.6 Preview 4 (just released!) is installable from
http://download.iiab.io/6.6


1) Profound thanks to all who can assist Matt Johnson now actively testing
the following 2 situations...where WiFi sometimes doesn't issue IP
addresses...OR sometimes disappears within an hour or so:

   - RPi WiFi hotspot sometimes doesn't work when Ethernet ISN'T plugged
   in? dhcpd fails to start? #989 <https://github.com/iiab/iiab/issues/989>
   - TK: RPi WiFi hotspot can fail within an hour if Ethernet IS plugged in
   during boot? #926 <https://github.com/iiab/iiab/issues/926>

*There is reason to believe that one or both of these highly intermittent
gotchas may be due to underlying Raspbian / firmware issues, possibly
raspberrypi/linux#2453 <https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/2453>
and
http://community.rachelfriends.org/t/loosing-wifi-connectivity-on-rachel-plus-3-0/838
<http://community.rachelfriends.org/t/loosing-wifi-connectivity-on-rachel-plus-3-0/838>
?  But we need more REPEATABLE PATTERNS -- thanks all who are able to
contribute, rebooting as many times as necessary until patterns become more
apparent and Written Up For Others !*

2) Thank you so much to Matt Johnson, who learned the hard way and again
reminded us today that NOOBS has a Very Different partition table from
Raspbian, and will not work :-)

3) In other news, IIAB 6.6 <https://github.com/iiab/iiab/milestone/3> has
converged **tremendously** over the past month, thanks to Arky and many
others' extremely intensive testing...by more than 10 different
volunteers...bringing this to fruition with at least 3 deployments having
just now in recent days gone live in schools with IIAB 6.6 pre-releases!
So even if we don't receive every last one of our heart's desires — yes
there will be a few KNOWN ISSUES even on 6.6 Release Day (see the
bottom of IIAB
6.6's Draft Release Notes
<https://github.com/iiab/iiab/wiki/IIAB-6.6-Release-Notes> !) I'm convinced
we can and should release around late August 2018, paving the way for IIAB
6.7 itself too coming very soon later this year :-)


ASIDE: should we consider supporting NOOBS and its very odd partition tables
<https://github.com/raspberrypi/noobs/wiki/NOOBS-partitioning-explained>
for IIAB 6.7 later this year, to embrace a substantially broader global
demographic, committing more deeply to reduce barriers to entry, in order
to welcome everybody?  (Or conversely is NOOBS's partitioning something we
just cannot touch, even with a 10-foot pole :-)  e.g. the current glitch
arising from "tune2fs -m 1 /dev/mmcblk0p2" on NOOBS can easily be fixed
using "tune2fs -m 1 /dev/mmcblk0p7" IF NOOBS should even be considered at
all?
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