Step 7 "Treehouses" Wifi Has No Internet (Workaround Found)

[JLKwong]

Problem

The "treehouses" WiFi does not have internet for connected devices, despite extensive troubleshooting.

Steps to reproduce the problem

Follow Step 7 as normal (https://treehouses.io/#!./pages/vi/nextcloud-tor.md).
Everything works up to this point (bold added for emphasis):

Once the green LED next to it on your Raspberry Pi stabilizes into a solid green, you should see "treehouses" appear in available Wifi networks. Connect to it, and make sure that you have an internet connection by opening up another web page.

After successfully connecting to the "treehouses" network, both a PC and mobile device state that the network has no internet.
When I attempt to open another web page or ping a common site by its name or IP address (e.g. 8.8.8.8, Google.com), it fails as if there is no internet for the "treehouses" network.
Additionally, the router does not list the Raspberry Pi as a connected device.

I tried the following troubleshooting steps:

1. Disabled MAC address filtering on my router, and confirmed that it's still disabled by removing a device from its allow list and connecting to it with that device
2. Checked that I re-imaged a brand new SD card, and not the previous SD card used in other steps
3. Checked that the image version is the latest (as of today, version 139)
4. Opened the autorunonce file and confirmed that it only contains the pasted text in the instructions
5. Retyped my username, WiFi name, and WiFi password into the autorunonce in case I didn't notice a typo
6. Connected to my WiFi with another device by manually inputting the same WiFi password
7. Checked that both the red and green lights are on continuously, without any flashing
8. Attempted to connect to the Raspberry Pi with the Treehouses Remote mobile app, but failed
9. When I connect it to an HDMI display, the monitor doesn't detect anything
10. Temporarily turned my 2.4 GHZ Wi-Fi into an open network, with broadcasting, no password, no MAC filtering; then re-attempted ALL instructions in Step 7 (including using "" for a blank password in the autorunonce file).
11. Connected the Raspberry Pi directly into the router with an ethernet cable. The "treehouses" WiFi still showed no internet, and my router still showed no new devices.

WORKAROUND

1. I skipped confirming that the "treehouses" WiFi had internet and brute forced the rest of Step 7 with the ethernet cable connected.
2. I was somehow able to pull from NextCloud using commands from ssh despite (1) ALL devices, mobile or PC, connecting to 'treehouses' and saying there's no internet, and (2) failing to connect to any website or ping any site by name or IP address even though the steps say to check for internet connectivity when you connect to the 'treehouses' Wi-Fi.
3. I was going to ignore any other failed steps (like making sure the 'treehouses' Wi-Fi has internet connectivity, which it does not, but the Pi itself seems to have connectivity due to the Nextcloud pull working.) The rest of the steps succeeded.

FURTHER TROUBLESHOOTING
I tried feedback from others in the Gitter chat, even if it was similar to what I had done before:

Connect to your pi by remote aka making it headless aka you should not have a display, keyboard, mouse connected to your pi, input and output is done through your PC not your pi

Although I used peripherals for troubleshooting purposes in the original troubleshooting steps, I disconnected all of them and made them 'headless' in case they somehow interfered with the Raspberry Pi. Re-attempting Step 7 from the beginning (including re-imaging the SD card and reconfiguring the autorunonce file) failed at the indicated step in the steps to reproduce the problem.

When you have your autorunonce file setup with your network info and loaded in your pi, you should see your name in your router's admin page (access by typing in 192.168.1.1) in Attached Devices.

To eliminate the possibility of user error, I saved my network username and password into a Google Docs file, and copied it pasted it onto several devices to test that there are no typos. I then copied and pasted that network information into my autorunonce file. Like the original troubleshooting steps, my router still failed to detect the Raspberry Pi, but did detect connections from the other devices.

You will see all the available networks and you should see an open network with the name treehouses. Click on that and then ssh@pi with password 'raspberry' and you have now remote connected to your pi.

This works and corresponds to my 'brute force' workaround. It skips the part of the instructions that tells the user to check if the "treehouses" WiFi actually has internet or can open a new web page.

Screenshots

N/A

Proposed solution

If the "treehouses" WiFi is actually supposed to let you test it by "[making] sure that you have an internet connection by opening up another web page," then I have a new router that I will be testing in the next 24 hours to see if it is simply a hardware issue on my end.

Otherwise, this part of the step should be deleted and replaced with:

If your PC says the "treehouses" WiFi has no internet, keep moving forward to the next steps. This is normal, and the Raspberry Pi should still be able to pull files online for the next steps.

I spent multiple hours troubleshooting this alone and with feedback in the Gitter chat to no avail, especially since one would not expect to successfully pull from NextCloud when the "treehouses" WiFi shows no internet for devices that connect to it.

UPDATE: I received my new router, set it up, and successfully connected 2 devices to it. When I updated the autorunonce file with the new WiFi username and password, the Raspberry Pi still fails to show as a connected device on the router's admin page, and devices connected to the "treehouses" WiFi still do not receive internet. However, after I connected it via the ethernet cable, the new router was able to detect the Raspberry Pi. Like in my workaround, I am able to start NextCloud via docker and connect to the generated Tor link. It seems that the Raspberry Pi is struggling to establish a connection when connecting to a WiFi network, but can still pull from NextCloud via SSH. Pinging from the Raspberry Pi's terminal shows it has connectivity to the internet, but all devices connected to it do not.

[BryanGazali]

While it sucks to hear that you had so much trouble with this step, this issue and the solution for it is a bit out of scope for the first steps.

[JLKwong]

I figured. xD I'll focus on other stuff.

Here's hoping this doesn't haunt me later on. 😰