Unable to connect when using Unifi AP - Troubleshooting / Wi-Fi - Rachio Community
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post by neile on Apr 9, 2018
I’m on Android. I’ll try the hotspot thing shortly.
post by neile on Apr 10, 2018
I enabled hotspot on my Android phone and the Rachio app never showed the network in the list of networks to configure. I enabled hotspot on my Windows 10 laptop, forced to 2.4ghz mode, and the controller successfully connected to the laptop and showed in the connected devices list. It sat with the blinking third light for a while then fell back to a second blinking light, and is now showing the third blinking light again. I assume this means that it failed to download the firmware update again. Can I just RMA this thing and get a replacement unit with the right firmware in it?
post by franz on Apr 10, 2018
I’ll talk to our success team tomorrow about your configuration. It’s really not the firmware but the inability to connect to internet. If they don’t have additional ideas I’ll work with them on next steps.
post by DLane on Apr 10, 2018
@neile - Oops my bad. Yes 2018. Just over a month ago.
post by lucasc on Apr 10, 2018
Can you try this for me? Go into your phone’s settings and forget the wifi network that you are connecting the Rachio to, then run a wifi reset on the controller (up button and circle button until all lights around the circle are lit) and then try onboarding the controller. If that doesn’t get you online, open up the help center of the app (click on the person button on the bottom of the main screen that says no controllers/add controller -> Help Center) then click run wifi scan (make sure you are still connected to the same wifi network you are trying to onboard and run the scan. Shoot us a ping when you’ve ran it and I will look into your scan results
Thanks
post by neile on Apr 10, 2018
Up button or down button? The app says down button to reset the wifi.
post by neile on Apr 10, 2018
I did the following:
- Forgot all wireless networks on my phone
- Put my phone in airplane mode
- Connected my phone to the dedicated 2.4GHz network I have for the controller
- Ran the Rachio app
- Powered up the controller and held up and round button until all the lights blinked, even though the app says down and round button
- Finished the app steps to select the network and password As with every other attempt the controller connected to the wifi network (I can see it in the list of connected devices), blinked the third light for a while, then went back to blinking the second light. I did the wifi scan and sent a report. I put “neile” in the description of the issue.
post by DLane on Apr 10, 2018
@neile - the up button is for a factory reset, the down button is just for WiFi reset.
post by lucasc on Apr 10, 2018
@neile It looks like we were unable to make a connection to our servers. Please configure your firewall to allow inbound and outbound connections mqtt.rach.io … There are a few other DNS addresses in there as well, but I have a feeling that if you just allow this one, the other should work ok.
post by neile on Apr 10, 2018
Aha! This isn’t a firewall problem, it’s a DNS problem. My DNS config is as follows, and gets sent to clients when they obtain their IP address via DHCP: 192.168.1.81 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4 The first one is a DNS server I run internally to provide name resolution for devices on my internal network. The other two are Google and handle everything else. My DNS server doesn’t forward on requests for domains it doesn’t know: it expects the clients to fall back to the other two name servers that were provided as part of DHCP. All other clients on my home network correctly handle this. It appears the Rachio DNS client doesn’t do this, and simply gives up when it gets a “nope” response from my DNS server.
post by neile on Apr 13, 2018
And for completeness: enabling DNS forwarding on my DNS server resulted in the Rachio connecting almost instantly. No need for any special wifi network or anything.