Smart (dumb) TVs - sudden loss of wi-fi connectivity on Samsung 7-series smart TV

UPDATE 13/4/2014: Problem solved. Thanks to Samsung and their local service partner, the problem was resolved by replacing a faulty wi-fi module (WIDT20R) at no cost despite being out of warranty. Balance has been restored to the universe.

I have a Samsung 7-series (UA55ES7100M) smart (dumb) TV. It has a nice big screen, good picture and is generally easy to use. I question most of the smart TV features, and have never used the 3D feature, but this is what came with a TV with a 55" form factor when I bought it. Since I got it unpacked, it's been hooked up to my home network wirelessly, initially over 2.4GHz then later 5GHz wi-fi after a router upgrade. Streaming of HD content was always smooth and problem free and Plex came along and made for a nice client through which to access this content. Recently though, the wi-fi connection has been decidedly flaky, and now doesn't really work at all despite no apparent changes in my home network setup.

Symptoms:

• No wi-fi connection from Samsung TV to any wi-fi access point I have
• Menu->Network->Network Settings allows wi-fi scan
• Not all access points show up to TV (all are set to broadcast SSID), despite them being visible to a multitude of smart phones, laptops and tablets from various manufacturers anywhere in the house, including near the TV in question
• Network Settings dialog box would bomb frequently after a scan for no apparent reason. Identified wi-fi SSIDs would be displayed for a fraction of a second then return to the TV display.

Attempted resolution paths (none of which worked...):

• Tried to set up multiple wi-fi access points (RS6300 at 2.4 and 5GHz, cable modem/ethernet/wi-fi router, Samsung Android AP). When these can be seen (not consistent), few, if any, successful connection attempts were made.
• Removed all authentication to see if that made a difference (it did not)
• Changed various radio settings in the access points, including forcing different versions of 802.11
• Tried to manually input IP address, DNS, gateway, netmask etc parameters in TV network settings but to no avail
• Did shut-down (via IR remote control) then power-down (at the wall) and restart of TV between network changes
• Released and renewed IP address on other devices on my home network to confirm the DHCP server was working correctly (it was)
• Reset both wireless routers
• Did full factory reset of TV. You won't find this in the manual, but for the model listed above you need to turn the TV off then press the following buttons on the IR remote control in quick succession: Info, Menu, Mute, Power. Note that the reset option under Menu->Support->reset doesn't touch network settings. The network set-up for wi-fi failed in the manner described previously, and for what it's worth, it took about 5-10mins to restore all the other TV settings from scratch via the setup wizard.
• I did NOT try to use a LAN cable (not really an option for me), but most people seem to report this generally works fine.

I appear to have v1040 of the TV firmware installed (via an online upgrade when the wi-fi set-up was working - strangely though, this version doesn't seem to be available on Samsung's website for download and installation via the USB method).

I have not yet tried to contact Samsung for support and can see that plenty of other people out there have experienced this issue, but none that have reliably fixed the problem (short of replacing wi-fi hardware module in the set itself).

The rest of my home network continues to work just fine and none of the access points have physically moved or been reconfigured or reflashed, and internet connectivity works fine for all connected devices.

Anyone out there had this issue and found a way to fix it?

Backing up Win 7 Home Premium via iSCSI + Synology NAS

This post describes how to use iSCSI on Win 7 Home Premium to work around the restriction of backing up to a networked device.

Like many of you, I didn't fork out for Win 7 Enterprise for my home set-up. One thing the Enterprise edition allows which the Home Premium edition does not is backing up to a network drive. Kind of irritating, when you consider that a lot of folks will have networked storage either in a NAS or USB attached storage to consumer networking devices like wireless routers and cable modems.

Until recently, I'd been backing up my Win 7 Home edition to a USB drive, then using the Synology Data Replicator 3 tool to shunt the backup data from the USB drive to the NAS. This is an irritating multi-step process and takes longer than it should.

To work around it (sorry, not going to go through the specifics but they can easily be searched for):

• set up an iSCSI target on your NAS
• use Windows 'iSCSI Initiator' tool to connect to the target
• use Windows Computer Management->Disk Management console to locate the new storage, format it and present it on your Win 7 machine wherever you'd like it (note that Windows backup will only let you back up to what it considers an external drive, so you may need to mount as a drive letter or folder other than on C:\). Despite the drive existing on the network, Windows sees it as a local hard disk.
• reconfigure your backup to point to the new backup location created in the above steps
• run your backup.

Now the external drive I was previously using for backups can go on to other duties.

Installing Oracle VM Server 3.2.2 (AMD x64)

I thought it was time to take a look at Oracle Linux to get a bit more hands-on before launching into some work based on this platform. I signed up for an Oracle id to access the software delivery cloud and started downloading ISOs. After some background reading I discovered that I wanted (for x86, 64bit):

• Oracle VM Server: the hypervisor (based on Xen)
• Oracle Linux: the OS (essentially Red Hat)
• Oracle VM Manager: something to let you start and manage VMs on your hypervisor
• Oracle VM Templates: various. Oracle VMs pre-built with Oracle products such as their database and middleware apps.

For the installation, I chose to boot off a USB pen drive (the VM Server boot image is only about 256MB), which I created whilst booted into Win7 using Rufus (see comment below about getting 'Boot error' below using Universal USB Installer to create bootable USB sticks).

In my Awared BIOS, F12 brings up the boot options menu during start-up/POST and you can select USB-HDD to boot into the OVM Server installer. Up came the Oracle VM Server splash screen and I hit enter to install at the boot prompt.

boot:
mboot.c32: not a COM32R image

Searching around on the 'net there are various remedies for this, including updating the /isolinux/isolinux.cfg file. I found this to not be helpful. Instead, download the syslinux distribution (I used 4.04) and copy /pathtosyslinux/com32/mboot/mboot.c32 to /oraclevmserverpath/isolinux/mboot.c32. Reboot and you should be able to start up the installer.

I won't drain the installer steps as they are pretty self explanatory but a few quick notes:

• on a basic PC setup, just create a 1GB logical partition to install Oracle VM Server under a single root file system using gparted or similar user friendly tool in a distro of your choice before you get started as the installer's text-based partitioning tool is clunky.
• the installer asks for an iso file to retrieve packages. This didn't make a lot of sense to me since the packages appear to be available in the USB Oracle VM Server storage created from Oracle's ISO image. I just copied the ISO file onto the USB stick under /images specified the device (eg /dev/sdc5) and directory (ie /images) and the installer was able to locate the required files to complete the installation.
• if using manually allocated IPs (not DHCP), think about setting up the IP and DNS entries ahead of time.
• if you have a multi-boot system, don't install boot loader in MBR, just the partition in which you install the OS. Run update-grub as appropriate once the installation is complete to add the installation to your grub boot menu.
• It's worth noting that I also tried to create various USB boot drives from a number of linux distros which would all generate get the message 'Boot error' when attempting to boot off a USB-HDD option via the BIOS. After wasting a lot of time investigating whether something was wrong with my BIOS firmware or settings, I discovered that using Universal USB Installer was the cause. I was made more nervous as there are a lot of reports of the GA-890FXA-UD5 F6 motherboard installed in my PC having USB-HDD boot issues however there seems to be some relationship to how the USB stick is prepared.