Echo dot issue, not portal related

[barrygordon]

Periodically a Dot ends up in a hung state.  The blue light is circling, no commands will be accepted. The Dot must be reset by pressing the action button (works sometimes) or power cycling the Dot (always works). I have 5 Dot's some gen 1 some gen 2 and this has happened to all of them. Frequency is low happening once every couple of weeks.

 

One customer rep told me to hold down the volume - and mute buttons for 10 seconds. That forced a reset to factory defaults and required the Dot to be re-setup as all info (wi-fi password) was lost. Her boss was not happy that she told me to do that with no prior explanation as to what it would do.  In fact her boss offered to refund the purchase price of all 5 Dots, and my not having to return them. I did not take him up on the offer, perhaps I should have.  

 

Is anyone else seeing the above issue?  Have you been able to resolve it?

 

The LAN is Gigabit in speed, the ISP rate is 60 mbs,, I own my own modems and router.  The router is Mikrotik, commercial grade, there are WAPs in the ceiling of each major room.  As I explained to a senior tech rep from the Amazon Alexa world: lets assume it is an infrequently occurring wi-fi or LAN or ISP glitch, I don't care. The solution is fixing the code not telling the customer to reboot their device.  I am waiting for self driving cars and a mechanic telling me to reboot my car.

 

As an aside:

I have determined that when dealing with customer service of almost all large companies in the digital world, what you are offered depends on whom you are speaking to. I had Brighthouse as my ISP, now Spectrum. I was annoyed with my bill being increased by $40/month the explanation being that I was on a special promotional offer (for 5 years). I asked if I could switch to Spectrum and was told, The price will be the same higher price, there would be a service call ($40.00), and the Tivo devices might not work. I kept calling getting different reps. Finally I got a rep that said what I was told was all wrong. A service call was not needed, It is just a billing change, everything would work as before, my bill will come down $40 / month. He made the change and I received a new billing invoice which was lower by $40 than what I was previously paying.

 

[Yoda_One]

I sounds like it lost( weak signal) the Wi-Fi connection and it in the process of acquiring the signal. I have almost the same setup and ISP but my whole place is setup with Cat5 to the Servers and the Wi-Fi has a couple repeaters. I have the same issues and my solution is just to unplug the Dots and I power off he Tap.

 

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Edited April 8, 2017 by Yoda_One

[pinuz]

Periodically a Dot ends up in a hung state. The blue light is circling, no commands will be accepted. The Dot must be reset by pressing the action button (works sometimes) or power cycling the Dot (always works). I have 5 Dot's some gen 1 some gen 2 and this has happened to all of them. Frequency is low happening once every couple of weeks.

 

One customer rep told me to hold down the volume - and mute buttons for 10 seconds. That forced a reset to factory defaults and required the Dot to be re-setup as all info (wi-fi password) was lost. Her boss was not happy that she told me to do that with no prior explanation as to what it would do. In fact her boss offered to refund the purchase price of all 5 Dots, and my not having to return them. I did not take him up on the offer, perhaps I should have.

 

Is anyone else seeing the above issue? Have you been able to resolve it?

 

The LAN is Gigabit in speed, the ISP rate is 60 mbs,, I own my own modems and router. The router is Mikrotik, commercial grade, there are WAPs in the ceiling of each major room. As I explained to a senior tech rep from the Amazon Alexa world: lets assume it is an infrequently occurring wi-fi or LAN or ISP glitch, I don't care. The solution is fixing the code not telling the customer to reboot their device. I am waiting for self driving cars and a mechanic telling me to reboot my car.

 

As an aside:

I have determined that when dealing with customer service of almost all large companies in the digital world, what you are offered depends on whom you are speaking to. I had Brighthouse as my ISP, now Spectrum. I was annoyed with my bill being increased by $40/month the explanation being that I was on a special promotional offer (for 5 years). I asked if I could switch to Spectrum and was told, The price will be the same higher price, there would be a service call ($40.00), and the Tivo devices might not work. I kept calling getting different reps. Finally I got a rep that said what I was told was all wrong. A service call was not needed, It is just a billing change, everything would work as before, my bill will come down $40 / month. He made the change and I received a new billing invoice which was lower by $40 than what I was previously paying.

 

Are the echo in between the main router and an access point? I solved my "echo is unable to connect to the Internet" and the blue circle loop you are describing by creating a guest network with Lan access on both my EA6900 with merlin and my access point extender with dd wrt, same settings, and also put the dots in static ip with Google dns.

Also enable the roaming assistant (which basically drops the client at certain power level to allow to connect to the adjacent access point.

If this makes sense for you, please try it.

Echo response time improved too after this.

Hope this helps

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[barrygordon]

The positioning of the dot vis-a-vis the router and a WAP should be irrelevant in my case.  My router does not do Wi-fi, only the WAPs. The router handles DHCP and all the Dots use a reserved DHCP address.  I will be changing that to static IP's this weekend to see if that improves things.  Thanks for the reply.  Also the Dots are in fixed locations so they should not be switching to different WAp'S.  I always use Google DNS Servers for my static IP addresses.

 

Thanks for the reply

Edited April 8, 2017 by barrygordon

[Scottmichaelj]

The positioning of the dot vis-a-vis the router and a WAP should be irrelevant in my case. My router does not do Wi-fi, only the WAPs. The router handles DHCP and all the Dots use a reserved DHCP address. I will be changing that to static IP's this weekend to see if that improves things. Thanks for the reply. Also the Dots are in fixed locations so they should not be switching to different WAp'S. I always use Google DNS Servers for my static IP addresses.

 

Thanks for the reply

Are you using a VPN client on the Tik? If so you have to route the DOTS outside it. I have to for mine. The DOTS would work fine for a while then drop off.

 

Also the Tik could be dumping the device states after a certain time frame or last used?

 

Last I would check the Tik forums and make sure this is not a NAT or Masq issue. Wouldnt think it was since rebooting the DOTS then work again but stranger things have happened.

[barrygordon]

No VPN client in use.

 

The mikrotik logs show no abnormal issues.

 

I wil l check the TIk forums.

 

Thanks for the reply

[Scottmichaelj]

No VPN client in use.

 

The mikrotik logs show no abnormal issues.

 

I wil l check the TIk forums.

 

Thanks for the reply

This post talks about changing the DHCP lease time. I maybe close

 

https://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?t=116151