Hi there,
I am supposed to be out with my wife orienteering. A very useful sport for people that spend a lot of time in the mountains exploring. But I had a problem in my lab. DHCP was not being supplied to any devices. Which means Apple TV’s, iPads and more. I looked at a lot of things trying to figure it out, and I connected a few things to wired Ethernet to get them working.
What I worked out was that anything wired was good, and anything wireless - if it rebooted, or released its IP was in trouble.
I run eero mesh wireless and I quite like it. But it quickly drew my attention. They are sort of, WiFi as a service. So I thought I would call them. After about 20 minute - composed of both hold and chatting, it turns out the problem was solved. I was surprised as eero in my world is in bridge mode and how could that impact Wifi devices getting a DHCP supplied address?
We did a hard reset - so 15 seconds with a paperclick on the first eero device - the LED turns red. Then support reconnected it with the other eero devices and all was good. The odds are I am told a soft reset of 5 - 7 seconds would have worked. It was nice since this is really Wifi As A Service so they were able to reconnect everything. They also do all the upgrades too.
So I am sharing since as it was not my first guess that the Wifi could be causing this issue so hopefully if it happens to you, you will have a head start.
BTW, it turns out if you use Comcast equipment, and it is directly connected to the eero, you may see this issue or something similar.
So now I really like eero support as well as the product!
Updates:
- 8/12/18 - another wireless outage. I learned something interesting. If the Internet connection goes down, like it did today, the Eero WiFi solution will go down too. Once your Internet connection comes back, your WiFi will too.
- 1/30/18 - today something very similar happened. I had an outage and had to restart the ISP modem. Everything came back OK except for two small security appliances. One of them in the UI showed me it could not see, nor manually connect to my Wifi. I restarted the eero that takes care of my office and both connected automatically back and all was good. The problem below did not happen again lately, but this is very similar.
- 10/13/17 - happened again today. And this time it was fixed in less than 20 minutes and this time they explained what happened. I turns out when my iPhone, or iPad was updated they were off and not using Internet. So for some reason eero deauthorized them. When they came backup up and wanted an IP they were deauthorized and did not get one. Why that happened is the bug and they are investigating and I expect it to be fixed soon. Definitely excellent support people and if they do fix it reasonable fast that would be pretty nice. Even at happening at the every 2 month stage is way too often. The way this looks is your device - cameras, or phones, whatever, have a wireless connection with eero, but don’t get an IP.
Michael
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Were they able to tell you WHY it was a problem?
HI Rob, the support guy I talked with was not sure. He was tier 1 and developers helped him in the background. He had been quite helpful, and I did not push very hard.
Michael
Hi Michael, love reading your blogs. I was thinking about getting Eero as well since I have weak spots around my home with a single router especially the backyard deck. I notice you run yours in bridge mode which disables some advanced features. Are you running gen 2 of Eero? In bridge mode, what do you run in front of the Eero? Thanks.
Hi Kent,
Thanks for reaching out, and I much appreciate hearing you like to read my blogs. That makes my day so thanks. I have Small Business Cisco firewall (RV325 - which works pretty good and is mostly easy to use) in front of eero. I use Windows AD to do DHCP / DNS in my lab / home. I am using Gen1 but Gen2 looks pretty good, and it has the smaller beacons that can go into more spots which is cool. It is pretty good stuff.
Michael