Networking and servers • A Pi doesn’t show localhost at my friend’s house

I made a work of art for a friend of mine. It’s a Raspberry PI 4B with a screen on it. It displays a webpage which runs locally, on localhost. It needs to connect to the internet only to keep the time and date up-to-date, which is needed for this webpage. Whenever I use this device at home it runs without an issue, whenever I start it up at my friends, it does start up, and it starts the browser, but it doesn’t show the webpage, even when it runs from localhost. It shows a server error in the browser. What puzzles me is that when I disable wifi via boot/firmware/config.txt, it does show the correct website. When wifi is on, it somehow cannot find localhost.

The setup is as follows:

Raspberry Pi 4B 2GB
Raspberry Pi OS Lite 64 bit (Bookworm)
Latest Chromium browser
lighttpd xserver-xorg x11-xserver-utils xinit openbox and PHP

I have the idea that this has to do with the router. She has a Zyxel DX5401-B1. It seems like the Pi doesn’t connect to it. Whenever I try to set up this Pi at her place, I cannot connect to it via SSH, while here at home that’s never an issue.

I think about connecting another pi via an ethernet cable directly to the router, and turn this Pi into a new access point. A waste, true, but I have no idea how else to solve this.

So my questions are:
Does anyone have a clue what is going on? Why it doesn’t connect to localhost, and why I can’t connect to it via SSH?
And are simpler solutions? Could an old USB-wifi module solve this?
Any help in understanding and solving this issue is much appreciated.

Statistics: Posted by vasilis — Sat May 10, 2025 7:36 pm — Replies 0 — Views 31

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