Hey!
I just flashed the os to my raspberry pi zero. I have it plugged in to a monitor and can see it boot. It doesn’t seem like the raspberry pi is creating a hotspot. Does anyone have any suggestions for trouble shooting?
are you able to plug a keyboard??? if yes you could look at the system log to see what happen
i do have a keyboard plugged in!
I apologize for my lack of experience. how do i read the system log?
Hi @Andrew_G, welcome.
As far as I know the Raspberry Pi Zero doesn’t have Wi-Fi. Are you perhaps using the Raspberry Pi Zero W?
Ben
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Yes i am using the raspberry pi zero w ty!
The wifi hotspot decided to show up! Now I’m having trouble connecting to http://gateway.local. I see we can try to connect directly to the raspberry pi. Is that the local ip address of the pi? The pi’s local ip address also does not seem to work.
I would still like to know how to read the system log for future debugging.
so far i tried
cd /var/log
/var/log/syslog returns pression denied
sudo /var/log/syslog returns command not found
sudo cat /var/log/syslog,
cat show the file on screen, if you only call /var/log/syslog it won’T show anything since you just call the file and not what to do with it 
also if you want to watch the last entry live: sudo tail -f /var/log/syslog
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Have you got as far as connecting the Raspberry Pi to your home network?
If not, then the documentation says:
If you are connected to the “WebThings Gateway XXXX” Wi-Fi network but you don’t see the welcome screen, you can try typing http://192.168.2.1 into your web browser’s address bar to manually navigate to the page.
If you have connected the Raspberry Pi to your home network, but you can’t access gateway.local, the documentation says:
If http://gateway.local fails to load (e.g. on Android or Windows) you can look up the IP address of the gateway on your home router and use that instead (look for a hostname of “gateway” or a MAC address starting with “b8:27:eb”.
Hope this helps.
Hey Ben ty for your response!
I connected the raspberry pi to my home wifi and tried connecting to the local ip address of the pi with no luck.
I will try to debug and re-flash my sd card a few times before coming back for more help.
@bfrancis I already have port forwarding set up for another project on my router. Could this be a reason why I can’t connect to gateway.local? I’m currently forwarding port 8080 and 5000
No, I wouldn’t have thought port forwarding from your router to another device would affect your ability to reach the local IP address of the WebThings Gateway Pi. And if you configure a *.webthings.io subdomain for the gateway, the tunnelling service doesn’t rely on port forwarding either.
If you can’t reach gateway.local it’s more likely that either you’re using a client like Windows or Android which doesn’t support mDNS out of the box, or your router is blocking DNS-SD/mDNS broadcasts.
If you can’t reach the gateway’s web interface using its local IP either, then either the WebThings Gateway web server has failed to start (which is unlikely), or there’s some problem with the connection to your home network.
Generic Raspberry Pi OS documentation may help you to debug the network connection.
I’m also asking around to find out if anyone else has had problems with the 1.0 image on the Pi Zero W, because I don’t have one to test with (we recommend the Pi 3 or Pi 4).
Edit: At least one other person appears to have it working on the Pi Zero W.
Thank you asking around!! I tried again and am able to run the gateway correctly so far without much trouble. I think part of the problem was that I wasn’t allowing the raspberry pi zero w enough time to think.
Edit still having problems
I’ve only been able to create and access my subdomain once. On other attempts I can log the pi into my network and see gateway under connected devices but cannot access the subdomain. Also if I try disconnect and reconnect power I always get an error that reads [end kernel] panic - not syncing: vps unable to mount root fs on unkown-block (179,2) and I have to reflash the sd card to get rid of the error. Kinda stuck in a loop here. Do you think I can be having low ram issues?
when you got your kernel panic, before reflashing could you extract the logs from the sdcard it could help us understand what maybe happening
Yeah that’s a good idea! I don’t know how to extract the logs. Can you point in the right direction?
You plug the sd card in the reader, browse to the log and copy past
Ahh I have a lot to learn. Thank you! I could not find a file with the word log in it but I found a file called cmdline.txt. Is this the log?
Here’s the contents of cmdline.txt
console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=PARTUUID=f7f1f035-02 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline fsck.repair=yes rootwait
you usually have the syslog file, and i’m not sure where the webthings log are stored
I think if I reflash the sd card I can get to the point where the gateway is connected to my wifi but where i cannot create or access the subdomain at the pis local ip or at http://gateway.local. If I am at this point would running sudo tail -f /var/log/syslog like you showed me earlier be useful?
it will show you the last log entries, are you able to connect to your gateway using his ip address?