Cannot Connect to Kodi or LibreELEC Repositories

    Hello,

    I am setting up Kodi on my Rpi 3b and I am trying to access add-ons in the LibreELEC repository but when I try I get a message saying "Could not connect to repository." The local time is also incorrect. I looked through the forum and saw people have had the same issues a few years ago but I could not find one with a solid resolution.

    The device is on a college guest wifi, I have tried accessing it with ssh root@<IPaddr> but was unsuccessful (I am new to this). Under Network settings I have Wait for network turned on and under NTP Servers it lists Timeserver #1, Timeserver #2, ...

    I'd appreciate some help getting this set up but I realize my Rpi might be too old for this. Let me know if any more info is needed (and how to find the info) to debugg.

    T

    This will be somewhat hard to guess at .. but here's some comments and thoughts:

    I'll make an educated guess that you can't SSH to the RPi as the college has implemented guest isolation on the WiFi network. It's a pretty standard restriction in "public" networks to prevent a device from interacting with anything except the gateway. It stops the computer science students from hacking everything (school networks are pretty hostile environments).

    RPi boards have no RTC chip so date/time defaults to the libc release date until the network is up and connman makes a successful NTP request to the default pool.0.ntp.org servers (there is normally no need to configure any). TLS certs can be invalidated if time is wrong because e.g. the current date/time is seen to be in the past and the valid-from date for the cert is seen to be in the future so although you have IP connectivity the TLS connection is (correctly) rejected.

    So there is probably an issue with NTP. If something blocks external access to pool.0.ntp.org or DHCP does not provide an NTP server (or worst, provides an invalid one) the clock is wrong and services using TLS certs (like repos) may not work. The workaround is to SSH to the device over Ethernet (direct cable) and set the clock to current time. You can also try configuring a local NTP server. If the college doesn't publish anything about their in-network NTP servers, try configuring the IP of the gateway as most will routers will respond to an NTP request.

    Another possibility is you need to 'authenticate' to access the Internet? - perhaps the college has a captive portal where you need to enter credentials or click 'go online' to proceed (like a Hotel, Airpot, Coffee Shop). If yes, the two suggestions are:

    a) Share the WiFi of a laptop over Ethernet and then connect the RPi to the laptop via Ethernet.

    b) Share the WiFi of the RPi over Ethernet and then connect a laptop via Ethernet. This cannot be configured in the GUI, but can be done using connmanctl over SSH; so SSH into the RPi over a directly connected Ethernet cable and then use connmanctl to enable 'tethering' over Ethernet. This will allow you to use a browser on the Laptop to visit the captive portal and complete whatever auth challenge is required.

    There's probably other things .. that's just what comes to mind.