My Venus is connected with an ethernet cable directly to my main router in the house. It works perfectly, never disconnects or anything.
However, when my router shuts down due to power trips (happens more often than you think with builders on site) or I restart the router due to firmware upgrade or just a maintenance cycle, the Venus does not reconnect to the router.
It keeps on working, or seems to, but I have to physically pull out the Venus’ power cable, plug it back it, and often do this a second time as well before it reconnects to my router.
Now this is a little frustrating because it means during that time my Home Assistant cannot access the Venus for my automations and if I’m not home there’s nothing I can do until I get back home to physically reset the Venus.
Is there perhaps a setting I should change? None of my other devices have trouble reconnecting to the router after a restart, not even the wireless ones.
I don’t really know much about the venus GX, but I understand that it is a small arm based linux machine similar to a raspberry PI. In that case, it may be something in the network config. For example if using networkmanager, you could look in /etc/network/interfaces and see if allow-hotplug is there for eth0
Venus uses connman (always thought that was an unfortunate name, but you’d have to talk to Intel about that… it is short for Connection Manager).
But there’s bound to be something in a log file. Usually if you just log in (obviously after making a plan to restore the connection) with ssh, and you type dmesg, it will dump the kernel’s “ring buffer”, which is basically a rotating loop of the most recent log messages. If it has some sort of issue with link on the port, then sometimes there might be something there.
Not sure about the login credentials you would need for the GX, @plonkster can help you there, but you can certainly SSH from a windows machine. Possibly the most common (not necessarily the best) SSH client is PuTTY. Available here: https://www.putty.org/
Go to your remote console on the web (will work on windows too), and do the steps as explained under " 1. Set access level to Superuser".
Then you need an ssh client. Apparently that’s built into Windows sometimes, but when I must, I use something called PuTTY to log into it, and WinSCP to copy files back and forth.
I seem to recall an issue when both the WiFi and LAN are active. It obviously can only use one at a time. Just as a test, disable the WiFi and then simulate the router reboot and see if it comes back up. I suspect that on a reboot the LAN connects first and then the WiFi. On a LAN failure it just switches over from LAN to WiFi but most likely not switch back unless you drop the WiFi connection.
Alternatively, when it disconnects due to a router reload just switch off your AP and see if it switches back to the LAN and then you will know. Set either of the two as active but not both.
I don’t have the Venus connecting to any WiFi networks automatically, but I do have it create a WiFi access point. Even if it does switch over to WiFi, there’s a router right next to it, so it should get more than strong enough signal to reconnect like that, albeit probably on a different IP. That is fine though, as I do scan for all devices connected to my network and not just look for the Venus on what should be its IP on LAN.
@plonkster I got an app on my phone to ssh into the Venus and used the dmesg command, but I assume that I’ll have to pull this just after I managed to restore the connection because I’m not really seeing something that jumps out to me as an error message (but I also don’t really know what to look for).
It would be even better if one can get into it through another channel (eg WiFi) and leave the ethernet connection in its broken state. Then one can inspect it in place. I have no idea what to look for, but I’d probably start with looking at the state of the ethernet device itself, eg:
Edit: BTW, the integer at the beginning of the line is in seconds… since the device booted. So you can always see messages that are old (eg, you can see the kernel booted in about 38 seconds and then nothing happened until I unplugged the ethernet cable this morning).
Agreed, if you can get into it via WiFi then you will probably see what’s wrong. The first thing I would check is the default route and where it points to and if it points out the correct interface (WiFi or Eth) IF the eth0 state is in an Up state.
You didn’t say that it’s a Layer-1 disconnect so I assume you mean layer-3 disconnect EG. you can’t telnet or http to the device. That said, if you telnet or http to the device from the same network you don’t need a default-gateway. What @plonkster showed above is a Layer-1 down state meaning the interface could not detect a voltage on the RX pair. As soon as a voltage is detected then it will change to an Up state but then you need to check for the MAC address of the other side, that is Layer-2. Once you have a MAC and DHCP assigned an IP (or fixed IP) then layer-3 is up. From there you should be able to ping from the local subnet. If your default-gateway/route is correct you will be able to connect from anywhere barring any external FW rules.
Yeah, that … I have all of that on Ctricial loads circuits behind a UPS … UPS for MY protection.
I “lose it” with “myself” if I do a inverter firmware upgrade, or I switch back to Eskom, and everything goes off.
The UPS is in a cupboard close to our bedroom … some evenings, more than one would expect, after 12am I can hear it clicking and clacking as Eskom does things, not LS, and the UPS tries to rectify the incoming power that passes through the inverter. Inverter is perfectly happy at the time.
Not to take food from Richard’s plate (and I must say, this is an excellent use of the DC-backup he is always championing)… but you could also use a small SMPS to create a low voltage supply directly from your batteries. You’d look at something like a LM2596HV, which has an input voltage of up to 60V. Hobbyist places may have one in stock. Remember to fuse the thing
For sure but momentary power outages are the main irritation.
The PUP costs R850. It will provide power to all internet devices (WiFi, ONT, switches) but we need to determine the voltages and plugs required so I can customise your unit. (12V and 5.5 x 2.1 DC plug is the most common.)
