Subscriber called me today saying his two Roku units wouldn’t attach to his wireless network. WiFi AP is a hAP lite tower running 6.38 (may be significant, as my current standard release is 6.37.3); it’s nothing but a stupid AP unit that bridges all traffic to the SXT router on the rooftop. I have other people running Rokus on 6.37.3 and below (mostly on mAP lites, not as sure about hAP lites), and they all work fine.
Anyway, error was “Unicast key timeout,” which often indicates old equipment that won’t talk AES, so I enabled TKIP. Still didn’t work. Next assumption was blown encryption chip (in the Roku, not the hAP lite, because the hAP was handling PCs with no problems). Turned off WPA temporarily and the Roku connected fine. Then he tried his other Roku unit, and it showed exact same failure with encrypted signal (it also connected fine with no encryption).
I ended up finessing the problem by creating a separate unencrypted virtual AP that accepted the MAC addresses of his two Rokus and nothing else. But it bothers me that this guy was having problems with Rokus when I have lots of other people using them with no issues.
To be fair, a web search finds a number of complaints from Roku owners (mostly from some years ago) claiming they changed their routers from WEP to WPA and their Roku stopped being able to get on the network – unfortunately, none of them have resolutions more enlightening than “it just magically started working a few days later.”
I just wanted to throw this out there in case someone else has seen similar misbehavior and knows what lies behind the problem.