I have configured my Pi according to the instructions in How to Install and Configure Piaware 5.0 SD card image - Quickstart Guide. I soon found out that the wifi interface did not come up. When I looked at /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa-roam.conf I found that the last character in my psk was missing. This character was “#”. I removed “#” from the key (changing the router configuration) and then it started working. The key is not extremely long so probably piaware has a problem with “#”. With Raspbian, Windows, MacOS, Debian, IoS and others I can use the original key!
1 Like
With special characters the password should be enclosed in simple quotes like this:
"password"
But this should probably have a remark in the guide to caution users before they have to go down the rabbit hole like you did 
2 Likes
LOL…What a coincidence. The password is ‘telling’ Piaware to ignore everything after the #, which is part of the password.
Thank you for mentioning the correct meaning of the quotes, @wiedehopf . I thought it meant a field that needs to be populated with your specific value.
2 Likes
Well, I used quotes!
That’s indeed a bug then.
for password like abcd#efgh try escape character \ before special character #
(untested, just a brain wave 
)
wireless-password abcd\#efgh
sudo reboot
Well you might need that in addition to the quotes when the quotes alone don’t help.
Anyway that’s still a bug.
Good idea! But unfortunately it didn’t work.
Deviating from main topic, just for fun.
You can generate random 32 characters password like this 
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ tr -dc 'a-zA-Z0-9~!@#$%^&*_()+}{?></";.,[]=-' < /dev/urandom | fold -w 32 | head -n 1
~wGBAvcR=dDz<Q8-VjQ0A8rq4RjS-8;=
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ tr -dc 'a-zA-Z0-9~!@#$%^&*_()+}{?></";.,[]=-' < /dev/urandom | fold -w 32 | head -n 1
{[qL9GzU3&SfsYu]52t~0RA}k->[f(BK
1 Like
Quotes should work. Let me poke at the config code.
(edit) It seems OK from a first look, though I don’t have a test system on hand. Will poke at it on a real system later.
Thank you for looking into this!
I can’t reproduce this problem on the 3.7.1 sdcard image.
pi@piaware:~ $ grep wireless-password /boot/piaware-config.txt
wireless-password "abcd#defg#"
pi@piaware:~ $ piaware-config -showall 2>&1 | grep wireless-password
wireless-password "abcd#defg#" # value set at /boot/piaware-config.txt:49
pi@piaware:~ $ sudo grep psk /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa-roam.conf
psk="abcd#defg#"
If you like, you could mail the problematic piaware-config.txt to oliver.jowett@flightaware.com (as an attachment, please) and I can see if it’s something specific to that file.