dgatwood

I tried *both* Ethernet ports and never got a DHCP request when using the May 15 build. No flashing blue light, either, so the problem might actually be worse than just Ethernet, but I don't have serial console hardware to say for sure. I also re-dd'ed the image just in case something miraculously went wrong the first time (which has never happened in all my years of doing this, but wanted to rule it out completely). I did not try re-downloading, but the sha256 checksum matches. In between those two attempts, I tried the out-of-support Ubuntu version that Rock Pi ships, and that worked as expected. I finally ended up downloading the November build of Armbian, which also worked as expected (both ports). The problem with trying to do custom device tree overlays is the same as the problem with bringing up Wi-Fi: the config files are on an ext4 volume, which can't be readily accessed from my Mac. Sure, I could hunt down an external SD card reader (I probably still have one somewhere) and a Raspberry Pi (I have more than a few somewhere, though only a couple of them aren't permanently installed inside something), booting that, SSHing to it, etc., but it's not worth the hassle when I can just downgrade to the November build. Sadly, my days of Linux kernel hacking are over, replaced long ago by having a hundred times more stuff to do than I have time for. 😁 I do have a proper serial adapter on its way from Amazon, and I'll try it next weekend to see what happens, assuming I remember and have time.

I confirm that the current version of Armbian, as downloaded, is completely useless unless you have a serial console, because it doesn't do DHCP successfully on either interface, so you can't SSH into it to fix the network problems. And I can see errors in the logs that you can click to view to see that the release was "tested". A loopback test needs to be part of the standard test. Turn on both NICs, give them IP addresses, and verify that they can communicate with each other. As it currently stands, Armbian is shipping releases that claim to be "tested", but in practice, can't be used by the vast majority of people who will download them, and that's a rather serious quality control fail. Additionally, Armbian should do something like what the OctoPrint firmware does — have a small FAT32 volume that contains wpa_supplicant. That way, you could at least bring up the Wi-Fi network if Ethernet doesn't work. Without any USB or HDMI output, the Ethernet drivers are effectively a single point of failure in this distro, and that's a bad situation to be in, particularly when there's apparently zero testing of that critical driver before shipping a build. I'd file a bug, but the bug reporting form won't let me unless I have serial console hardware, even though the problem is entirely obvious without it. 🙄 Downloading an older build now. Ugh.