CNI rebooting issues?

Have got an existing customer who has a CNI which they use to remotely use cbus, got a call because they have been having alot of power failures and the CNI is not reconnecting to the network when the power is back on..

she says to make it work she has to shut down and power up the CNI directly to reset it and make it work.. she is going on holidays for a few weeks and wants to be able to access it even if the power did go out and come back on again..

does anyone know how/why it wouldnt be powering up and reconnecting automatically?

Thanks

 

When you say that the CNI is not reconnecting to the network, what do you mean? What are the symptoms your customer is experiencing?

 

well i suppose it comes down to her not wanting to have to reboot the CNI directly after a power outage, it doesnt seem to reconnect after a power outage, but the computer and router are set to reboot after a power outage..

the main concern for customer is if they are away they want to be able to access their network remotely, iphone etc.. and they are worried that if the power goes out that it wont reboot properly and hence wont allow them access to their cbus network

they say that no settings have been changed on the router/computer or no new hardware has been added to the network (eg new router or computer)

all unit and cbus indicator light seem to operate as per normal but it seems to be locked out in some way..

does that help? thanks

 

What is the IP setup of the CNI. I dont need to know the specific IP address I just want to know the setup.

What is the DNS setup ?
Is it DHCP ?

What is the DHCP setup of the router ? How many IP addresses are you covering under DHCP ? Is the CNI IP address inside or outside the DHCP range of the router ?

Sometimes when people serve out DHCP from .2 ~~ .254 and then try to apply static IP addresses inside that range it causes a IP renewal leasing error timeout by the router (the most common DHCP source).

It would probably help if you update the firmware on the router and then also narrow the DHCP range to 64 ip addresses. Then make sure the IP address of the CNI is well outside the range of the DHCP numbers covered.

You can also apply a firmware update to the CNI using tools available on the OEM website.

 

Not really. You have just said the same thing again with more detail.

You say it won't reconnect, but you haven't said what you mean by this. What is it not connecting to?

Are you saying the CNI won't connect to the Ethernet network or the C-Bus network?

What is using the CNI? Is it HomeGate, Wiser or some other software?

 

Not sure if this is the same issue but we have a CNI and wiser which requires re booting every morning.
we have 2 scenes stored on a PAC "all on" and "all off" to give the site robustness and around 8 scenes stored on the wiser.
All works well during the day, but the following morning any scene store on the wiser is unresponsive untill you re boot it.
Scenes are selected via a DLT, all on, all off, all 50%, Etc,Etc.

"all on" and "all off" stored on the pac works 100% of the time.

Tried all sorts including swapping the wiser/cni

I wondered if there was a loose connection on the c-bus network would this cause the wiser/cni to freeze? we have around 30 devices and a long network.

Any ideas

 

Which version of Wiser firmware are you using? You should see 1.22.0. When it is unresponsive, are you still able to ping the Wiser, can you get to any of its webpages like http://192.168.2.1/index_i.htm? Is the Wiser configured to be a PPPOE client or static ip, dhcp? I ask because I've heard of issues with setups where the Wiser was configured for pppoe even though it was used as a LAN device.

 

1.22.0??? Is this a new version available. Thought that 1.21.0 was the latest?

I haven't had any issues with wiser, but I don't use it for scene's, logic etc. Just hangs off the back of the main router with every thing disabled (Wi-Fi and DHCP). Just using it as a dumb way to access c-bus with a GUI. The routing part is over rated. Let the real routers do that job. Most decent ones don't hang or require reboots. But you get what you pay for.


Would have been better & cheaper option for a CNI to have a in built web server.
Just my 2 cents.

 

Hi,
The wiser is 1.21 which comes from what I thought was the latest Piced 4.92.
we have a dedicated router with static IP set to DCHP and the Wiser has been given a fixed IP and DCHP disabled, The wiser wireless is on and working.
As this is a large building the main router is at one end and the wiser at the other which is useful for internet access via either device. I'm not an authority on networks, but I guess it's more like a wired access point.

Yes you can Ping the wiser successfully
yes you can gain access to the wiser interface
Yes you can control everything as you would expect

until the regular freeze. I have not tried to Ping whilst the wiser is frozen. Would that information help?

Thanks for you input guys

 

Yup, it would. If the ping succeeds then that would imply the hang lies purely in Wiser's software stack. If the ping fails, then the failure could lie in the communication path to the Wiser which could also involve other devices. It would be good to confirm whether when the hang occurs, you are still able to access the Wiser UI over the wired network. I have a Wiser unit here for control of our office, and it runs logic and has about a half dozen scenes. I use it pretty much daily over both the wired and wireless network. I would expect it to work the same way for you so I would suspect either a project specific problem or a communication path problem. You are correct 1.21.0 is latest for PICED 4.9.2.

 

Hi,

Returned to to site to find the wiser in the frozen state again. Tried to connect via the wiser UI which resulted in the connection page starting up followed by "unable to connect to wiser".
Re boot and all works fine again.
We tried interupting the c bus network whilst everything was working to see if this was the cause of a loose connection somewhere but the wiser worked fine. Even if the wiser was directly disconnected from the c bus network it returned to a working condition straight away.

The router set up is as follows

The main netgear router is set to DHCP

Wiser
Internet connection type "automatic DHCP"
Network setup Router IP 192.168.1.50
Mac Address 255.255.255.0
DHCP server setting "Disabled"
Wireless "Enabled"

 

That's very useful info. The fact that it loads the connection page suggests that the web server is active and it is the Wiser engine that has failed, ie: hence the "unable to connect to Wiser". I don't have an explanation at this time of what could cause that. One thing I'm aware of is that there is a Wiser bugfix firmware version, 1.22.0 that was made available to fix issues with Wiser's handling of scenes of a particular size. I'm not sure of the process by which a customer can get that so I'll look into that and try to get back to you here. It may also be advisable to contact customer support and get an issue raised.

Also, if you're willing to post your project CTA and router settings (Administration->Backup Configurations), I'd be happy to load it onto my Wiser and see if it is still up tomorrow.

 

Hi

Thanks for spending the time to reply.

Thats interesting because the wiser has around 10 scenes with about 70 groups in each scene. So I guess that would be classed as a large scene?.

I did contact tech support around 3 weeks ago and I'm not having much luck in getting an answer. They are waiting for tech support in australia to help out, so it down to the power of the forums.

I'll try tech support and try and locate this 1.22.0.

Thanks again for all the help.

 

Hi Guys,

I got hold of a copy of 1.22 firmware for the wiser. Installed it last week and we have not had any problems that needed a re-boot.The wiser has been fine.

So just to recap. the wiser running on 1.21 appears to have issues when the wiser is storing large scenes (how big is large?) well I have around 10 scenes with 70 groups in each scene. Its a simple fix with the 1.22 firmware if you can get hold of it as it's not currently available within the piced or from the downloads page. I got mine from tech support.

Thanks again to all for your help and in particular kjayakumar for pointing out the possible existance of the new firmware.