Adding a Roku player to Ruckus guest WiFi

At my workplace, we’re using wireless APs from Ruckus, which I’m very pleased with.  They provide both our internal and Guest SSIDs, the guest traffic being VLAN tagged and routed directly to the internet.

Within the Ruckus config, there are many options to tweak the WiFi rules and behaviors, and besides rate limiting guests, I also enable full wireless client isolation on that SSID, on the idea that nothing good can come from guests poking at each other’s traffic.

The Guest SSID is also the right place to provide internet access to the Roku players we have hooked up to TVs in the office for streaming media and/or a loop of commercials we’ve made. However, on setup, I’ve found that the Rokus do a “connecting to your local network” step, which fails with an error code 014.

In my situation, this happens due to the wireless client isolation, which is stopping the (unnecessary) local network pings the Roku is trying to do.  It’s a fine check for home users, but in my case, it’s not a problem.  Rather than turn off the isolation, or enable a new SSID with different rules for the Roku players, there’s a secret hidden menu in the Roku, which will allow one to “disable pings”

Problem is, you can’t get there until the Roku does a firmware update. And it won’t do an update unless it can get to the network. Only solution I found for that was to briefly attach it via Ethernet, do the update, and then continue the setup wizard, associating the device with an account, letting it update channels, ect, removing it from Ethernet once those are complete.

Once it has done all the updates, it’s time to disable ping to let it associate via WiFi.  To do so:

1. Press the home button 5 times
2. Run right to left and back through the FF, play/pause and Rewind buttons: FF, Play, Rewind, Play, FF

You’ll now get one of the “secret menus”, where besides the device temperature, IP address, paired RF remote ID, you’ll get the option to Disable Network Pings. Select this, and the WiFi setup will now work, via Settings: Network: Wireless.

For bonus fun, dig into the “WiFi Secret Screen”- you can run iperf from the Roku there! (BYO iperf server, of course.)

Second fun thing, if you have Fingerprinting enabled in the Ruckus management, the Roku is identified as a “BATM VoIP Adapter”. Not quite accurate.