Wiser disconnecting from cbus

Hi,

I have just come across a problem with a wiser that appears to be losing connection to c-bus every periodically. ? sometimes fine for weeks, other times only fine for hours.

The reported symptoms are that it can still be connected to from the iphone app but any user actions are never auctioned on c-bus. Also on this site scenes are stored in the wiser and so when this happens the wiser never gets the trigger from the switch and/or never executes the scene changes making all of the switches appear unresponsive. I am told that power cycling the c-bus network and wiser (all the c-bus power supplies and wiser are on the same breaker) invariably fixes the problem for a while, anything from a few hours to a few weeks.

I have not been able to get access to the site yet so I don?t have any more details but I was wondering if anyone else has come across anything similar. If anyone has any ideas or has seen something similar before I would be very grateful for any pointers.

Pete

 

I've been seeing similar reports on the forum over the past couple of months. Frustratingly, no one has reported a solution or identified what the problem is.

http://www.cbusforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9260&highlight=wiser

http://www.cbusforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10003&highlight=wiser

When you observe this state happening, it would be useful to see what the CNI reports as its current state of connection to C-Bus and also whether it is currently connected to the Wiser.

 

Just an additional data point. In at least one case where the symptom was as described above, it turned out that the problem was a transparent mode connection. Meaning, Toolkit was running on a PC and had opened the Wiser in transparent mode. When in this state, Wiser logic and C-Bus activity from the Wiser UIs have no effect on C-Bus because the Wiser is transparent and its C-Bus connection is used by Toolkit. The Adobe Flash UI should indicate this by saying that the Wiser is in transparent mode.

Now, if a customer has enabled the remote CNI port access, then there is alos the possibility that internet port scans will hit this port and cause it to switch into transparent mode. Port 10001 is a common port used for the Wiser CNI port and unfortunately some backdoor/virus called ZDaemon.126.Trojan uses this port and so script kiddies on the internet are scanning for this port. When they hit this port, your Wiser will go into transparent mode, and when they disappear silently, your Wiser will remain in transparent mode. One way to avoid this is to ensure remote CNI port is disabled until you actually want to use this, enabling/disabling it is done via UI Tools->Remote Access.

 

Hi kjayakumar,

Your point about internet connections is very interesting, I had initially discounted that as I had assumed that if something naughty opened up tcp10001 once it realised it wasn?t one of its bots or there was no exploit available it would most likely drop the connection in order to preserve resources to attack someone else, in this case I then assumed that once the connection was dropped wiser would revert to non-transparent and continue as normal.

Rather than block the port or disable remote access I can enable logging on the router for connections to this port and hopefully will be able to correlate and prove this. It could take a few weeks but I will post what I find for the benefit of others.

Thanks,
Pete

 

Hi,

We have now managed to demonstrate that the problem is not related to spurious connections putting the wiser into transparent mode. We had logging enabled on the internet facing router and still saw the wiser not being able to access c-bus for periods of time. We further proved this by closing all ports forwarded to wiser except 80, and again still experienced the disconnections.

We also managed to see a disconnection happen while we were on site, the cni was showing both orange lights on lan and cbus (the link light for the cni on the wiser was on) there were occasional green flashes on the cbus led on the cni.

It was not possible to connect to the web interface of the cni. A re-boot of the entire wiser did not fix the problem.

We pulled out the power/network bus ? just enough from the cni to cause it to lose power and reboot and then put it back in. after a coule of seconds we got a green led on the LAN side and we could connect to the CNI web interface and everything came good.

I now suspect that problem is either a faulty CNI or the power/network bus is not making a good Ethernet connection, maybe good eough to get link, but not all pins and not enough for IP connection.

Unless anyone has any other ideas we will replace first the bus with a network cable and separate power supplies and see if this fixes the problem.

Peter

 

One thing I would check. When you go to the CNI's webpage in the working case, does it report a valid serial number. The other thing I would check is just to do a scan on the C-Bus network with toolkit to make sure there are no duplicate unit addresses or high error rate type issues. Yes, I think trying a separate power supply for the CNI and direct cable connection between the Wiser ethernet and the CNI would eliminate that variable as a concern.

 

Had the same problem. Replaced only the CNI and all has been good for a while now. Faulty CNI sent back to Clipsal and awaiting to hear how it is repaired.

 

Seems Solved

It appears it was the physical ethernet / power bus. We replaced it with an ethernet cable and made a power jumper cable and it has been problem free for a few months.

My suspicion is that daily thermal expansion and contraction was causing the problem with the bus, the location of this particular unit is in a loft space so can go from 5C to 35C on a daily basis quite easily - maybe causing just enough movement to upset the ethernet connection in the bus.

Not the root cause of the problem that I was expecting but thought I would post it back just in case anyone else has this issue in the future.

I have always thought that the bus was not the strongest part of the product.

peter

 

Agreed. That busbar has given me headaches as well.