Running a P4 in headless mode and unit keeps dropping it’s IP address so loses connection and becomes unreachable. When I plug in a monitor, keyboard and mouse the unit seems to be up but a ifconfig -a shows no IP address. Then a reboot and IP address appears, however this morning that only lasted a few minutes and the Pi lost connection again - host unreachable. As an aside, a few days back the WiFi stopped working and has never recovered.
Could this be caused by overheating? I noticed the Pi was quite hot to touch today.
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Hi Rudy,
If you’re connected via WiFi, often interference (eg. from a microwave) can cause disconnection, especially if it’s a weak signal to start with.
If your Pi has been severely overheated it is possible that the wifi chip has been damaged (but it would’ve had to get very hot.
There’s some good tips here on getting connected headless:
And a few different approaches to making sure it stays connected in the answers here:
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Hi Oliver,
Thanks for the prompt response. I have checked my wpa_supplicant.conf file and everything appears to be in order. Curiously, I can ping the wifi interface but on the desktop it says that no wifi adapter has been detected. Also, when I hover over the wifi icon it says that dhcpcd is not running.
I’m running in headless mode ok. I did notice that the pi temp was 73.5C so I switched the fan on and temp is much more manageable at 45C.
Rudy
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I have this exact same issue running a Pi4 8GB 64bit Buster… I changed SD cards , USB , Swap files , it would still drop out … I’ve currently rolled back to a 32bit OS to see if that changes anything.
my fan on my Pi runs constantly so it never really gets hot… so i doubt its temp related too.
My setup wasn’t true headless , but i would VNC into it from my desktop.
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When I searched for the above sentence for Raspeberry Pi, this is the first link I got. See if the solution works.
If it is the “Raspbian Lite” which tends to shut off wifi, found this solution.
The final option will be to back up your “user files,” and do a fresh install or if you have a backup SD card, use it and see if the error is reproducible. If it is, then it is the hardware or else it is the system files.
G
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