Quote:
Originally Posted by davidfor
No WiFi? All the setup can be done over WiFi most of the devices. The Touch was the last that couldn't out of the box, but if it has newer firmware on it, it can.
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Hi David.
I figured out what's going on.
Wait until one of your KOBO's gets out of sync firmware wise. eg: an old version of firmware.
Then take it to a coffee shop, or someplace commercial, which has a virus firewall on the wireless router like most commercial/company installations do in the USA to protect themselves from being sued by customers. ( Eg: Dan's guardian is fairly common around here where I live. ).
What happens is that the Kobo checks the store, realizes that the firmware is old -- and tries to do an upgrade; the upgrade fails -- and the system, rather than allowing you to log in using the old firmware, wants to restart and install firmware that it failed to download. This is especially true of a KOBO that has no books on it at all, and is factory reset ; as once you have books, and have read the tutorial book -- the Kobo acts differently.
Of course, after restarting -- it checks for firmware upgrades, and finds that an upgrade is required... attempts to download it and the cycle begins all over again.
I'm not sure exactly how the KOBO wireless upgrades work, but the cycle I just described is what I think is going on; there appears to be two reboots/restarts sometimes when I upgrade without a firewall involved, so there may be other failure modes that are more complicated than I just described because it might be possible that *part* of the upgrade happens when a firewall is present, but not the whole upgrade or it might be possible that the virus firewall's are inconsistent in what they block.
A wireless firewall is not supposed to stop text, and internet pages from downloading -- so that explains why text such as ebooks, and epubs, download just fine but a program which could have a virus, such as an unprotected firmware download -- does not work.
Note: When I upgraded the firmware manually, that allowed me to use the KOBO store without incident from then on; so -- I'm thinking the issue is that the firmware upgrade comes in a format that is incompatible with standard firewall software. eg: All the problems go away as soon as I install a wireless access point that has no virus protection (a bad idea, but necessary). Therefore, I suspect that KOBO's aren't smart enough (yet) to figure out when a standard firewall is interfering with upgrades.
It would be nice if KOBO had a message warning the user when a firewall was causing problems.
Lots of users don't have control over their internet access, especially those who go on vacation and rely on coffee shops as places to download books.
Also, as I mentioned before -- Kobo's don't appear to support ad-hoc mode as of May 2015, so merely buying a USB dongle to work in ad-hoc mode isn't good enough to test the problem out with; I had to buy an actual wireless access point and learn how to configure it, in order to even run a test.
Most non-technical people I know of would have just thrown the KOBO out.
If you can't replicate the problem, I'd be willing to film an upgrade and post it on YouTube to show exactly what it was doing to me; Let me know.