Wattbox: Detect immediate internet fail during initial boot
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Tim Farrell
I need the Wattbox to detect Internet Down after a power failure which also drops power to the Wattbox itself.
If the unit successfully connects to the Internet (light turns green), subsequently losing the Internet (light turns red) is properly detected and it power cycles the programmed outlet.
However, I need to detect loss of Internet when the box is freshly booted. If the Internet was not yet detected during the current boot and/or DHCP never completes, the Internet light never turns green, and thus never transitions to red. It should begin the power outlet cycle routine as programmed but does not.
I tried this with static IP instead of DHCP and I also tried adding "127.0.0.1" as one of the hosts I ping with the OR option. Thus "Internet" is detected because it can ping itself on the loopback. In this condition, the Internet lights flashes green but still does not transition to ever power cycle the outlet.
Any other thoughts?
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Tyler Jordan
What model are you referring to? The WB-150/250/800s do this. The older 300/700 do not.
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Jay Juarez
So Tim, can I point out a flaw with the baseline logic of your quest? There are two scenarios that could affect the process. 1. If the internet failure is due to an actual outage on the ISP side, you will be continually rebooting outlets for no reason. 2. If the router is still in the process of rebooting, it will fail the test and again start a reboot cycle. Regarding the loopback, that ping indicates network addressability but not "internet". Don't take this as criticism, I'm just trying to understand what exactly are you trying to achieve.
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Tim Farrell
I appreciate the reply. Regarding your questions:
1.) That's OK. Reboot forever if there is no Internet. No harm.
2.) Understood, this would be set by programming. Call it 5 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever is appropriate to give the router enough time to boot normally.
I recognize that actual Internet connectivity is unnecessary. Only a pingable address. So I ping 1 device on my network, used as the criteria to determine whether connectivity is working. If not, power cycle. That works absolutely fine if the Wattbox successfully boots up, pings that IP at least once, and the subsequently fails.
But since that doesn't work when the Wattbox boots initially and can't establish that very first successful ping, I started thinking about how might I convince the Wattbox that "internet" came up with a pingable address. That's why I tried the loopback. The thought process was loopback will always be pingable, so the wattbox will see a successful ping and start it's detection process. By combining this with the OR method, when the other IP is unreachable for the programmed duration, it should kick off the power cycle. Unfortunately this was unsuccessful too.
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Tim Farrell
One thought that may work (though not indefinitely, it's likely to catch the majority of cases)...
Since the Wattbox loses time on every boot, I can reliably program the device to power cycle target outlets on 2001-01-01. The GUI prevents scheduling events in the past, but it can easily be done with CURL (see screen shot ; yellow highlights show how to set time, including back date...green highlights show cookie and csrftoken -- your cookie and csrftoken will be different, and change every login ; I can help you automate that if you want)
With a maximum of 20 allowable scheduled events, I can setup 15 minute intervals for 5 hours, 30 min intervals for 10 hours, etc. Then, once the device comes online, NTP sets the correct time and thus the remaining scheduled events never get triggered.
And I can keep the device programmed for next time by monitoring it so that when I see it come online, I simply re-add any missing schedule entries.
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Tim Farrell
Unfortunately, I think I'll have to trash these units. I legit wanted to buy thousands of them if I could just get this simple configuration working.
But instead of helping facilitate a large sale, support instead admonished me for my nerve purchasing a couple units for evaluation without the assistance of a "dealer".
They claim that what I'm trying to do works on their test units, so I must be doing something wrong. But instead of helping with any actual suggestion, all I got was "talk to your dealer".
I hate accusing people of lying, but I don't believe them. I have two different evaluation units here and both do the exact same thing. I even asked if they could simply export their configuration so I could load it on my unit. Crickets.
Then I sent a screen shot, asking them which of the basic configuration options I've managed to get wrong that makes my unit behave differently than theirs, but they made some weird claim about the web interface in my screenshot being from software "more than 10 years old", despite it being from their 18 month old (latest) 2022 firmware.
I realized at that point support was not going to be helpful and that it would likely continue to be my experience in the future if I had actually deployed thousands of them throughout my network, so I opted to look at competive products. It's too bad too, the footprint and hardware quality was really ideal for my situation.