A streaming media player in the Basement Laboratory Warehouse Wing has a concrete block wall between it and the WiFi router, so that even high(er)-gain USB antennas can’t grab enough signal for reliable streaming. After some fiddling, I snaked a cable from a hub, along the floor joints, to the Pi and declared victory. It turned out the Pi, an old Pi 1 Model B, had some trouble keeping up with the times, and I eventually swapped it for a Pi 3.
Forcing a static address for the wired port followed the now-standard recipe, with eth0 instead of wlan0 in /etc/dhcpcd.conf.
However, plugging a network cable into the Pi 3 then produces two network connections: the wired one I wanted and the aforementioned unreliable WiFi link through the built-in hardware. The only reliable way to turn off the WiFi connection seems to require applying The BFH through a line in /etc/rc.local:
sudo ifconfig wlan0 down
Removing my WiFi credentials from /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf prevents the hardware from connecting before the hammer comes down.
And then it streams perfectly…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 