I think I am going to add an EISY program that turns off, waits 60s, turns back on - my cable modem - maybe run it twice a week. I have a remote house that is not impossible to drive to but would take a good chunk out of the day round trip. This past week, my EISY at that residence was being reported as Offline by UD-Mobile, and apparently it was as I was not able to access it over my VPN. But, I can't tell if it's the cable modem or the Synology router that is flaking out - I believe it's the cable modem. The cable modem has no interface to access or test or even ping. I assume that turning off the cable modem (with an on/off device) would not cause any grief to my EISY device and it will continue to run just fine on the local LAN for the approx 2 minutes when the cable modem is not available. My hope, is that if it is in fact the cable modem that flakes out then I can avoid a week+ time period with no remote/vpn access. I assume I could also do the same for the Synology router but that has a reboot schedule built-in (and I hope that the reboot is for the entire mesh).

Not sure how long it would take UD Mobile to find that it cannot connect to this EISY.

Wondering if anyone has had to do something like this?

There's a few moving parts here and it's probably best to go through them.

(Good brand) Cable modems are not problematic. My arris s33 cable modem about to go into to its 5th year and I've never had to reboot it. If I lose internet, lights on the front tell me that Xfinity is not communicating with the modem, not the modem

What brand router do you have? That can be another weak link. In my experience, you get what you pay for with routers.

Another complexity is running a VPN. If you have the UDI portal, you can access the eisy without a vpn and without opening ports in your router. Based on what's written, I'm most suspicious of the VPN. How is the VPN endpoint set up in the remote house, what is hosting it?

Just now, paulbates said:

There's a few moving parts here and it's probably best to go through them.

(Good brand) Cable modems are not problematic. My arris s33 cable modem about to go into to its 5th year and I've never had to reboot it. If I lose internet, lights on the front tell me that Xfinity is not communicating with the modem, not the modem

What brand router do you have? That can be another weak link. In my experience, you get what you pay for with routers.

Another complexity is running a VPN. If you have the UDI portal, you can access the eisy without a vpn and without opening ports in your router. Based on what's written, I'm most suspicious of the VPN. How is the VPN endpoint set up in the remote house, what is hosting it?

The router is Synology (full mesh with 3 nodes in the house#2). I consider Synology brand (both routers and NAS) as A++. The VPN is run by Synology's "Site-to-Site VPN" built-in which is using IPSec - both sides are using the same Synology devices and the same VPN config - the VPN is good. The VPN is not the problem - given that UD Mobile cannot access my EISY (at house#2) and pops up a notification that it cannot. If I lost just the VPN then UD Mobile would still see that EISY (at house#2) through UD Portal. I do not use the VPN for UD, I use it for the remote cameras to write back to the NAS nvr in house#1. I do not have any modem lights to look at on the modem - I'm not there to see them. But even if I were, I do not feel that is any guarantee since house#1's fiber modem, the LEDs are not accurate since I've had to reboot that thing about 1 to 2 times a year when all "looks" okay. Interestingly, I am going to swap out Cablevision's modem with my old Arris Surboard (that I used in house#1 before upgrading to fiber). (Fiber is not available at house#2 and wouldn't pay for it even if it were.) I don't recall having to reboot the Arris Surfboard but I had that modem for about 5 years maybe but maybe I did. My main reason for "bringing my own equipment" is to knock down the monthly fee and that the Arris SB is just collecting dust right now.

Interesting though that my Honeywell thermostat reported no outage but I suspect it uses very minimal "heart-beat" (not sure if it keeps an open TCP connection). I could at very rare times access a camera or 2. I suspect that the modem, for whatever reason, had downgraded me to a trickle (and not for using excessive bandwidth).

I should add that when I arrived at house#2 I just restarted everything at house#2. Router lights were all good at least. I could have messed around and did some diagnosis but I wasn't there with a computer. Restarting both modem and router(s) UD Mobile was back online with that house's EISY.

IN my former location I was using ASUS routers in a three unit mesh. They had problems. However a lot of deices have problems with mesh setup also. Many devices will not tolerate changing APs if the are mobile devices and move. Many devices will not tolerate the quickie testing routers can do to change bands.

I wrote some ISY programmes to test if things were not responding and use progressive power cycling of the routers (increasing in cycle length times) and that seemed to fix most of it.

Then I got another WiFi device with remote control that I could power cycle the ISY from another country if needed. Now, I had both ends covered after a few vacations were everything was dead for two weeks and I was helpless to fix it.

Since moving, I have an ISP combo modem and, like the others, it doesn't like the frequent power blinks the utility does here. It seems ISY and polisy now tries to get an IP address from the router DHCP server and when it can't, it just gives up and disconnects. Poor design.

The fix, this time, was to get a fridge low voltage detector for polisy and when the power blinks it delays power up on my polisy for five minutes. I haven't seen that problem now for about a month since install. This allows the router to come up to speed, before polisy even tries to request an IP address.
They sell on amazon for about $15 so well worth the price.

40 minutes ago, larryllix said:

IN my former location I was using ASUS routers in a three unit mesh. They had problems. However a lot of deices have problems with mesh setup also. Many devices will not tolerate changing APs if the are mobile devices and move. Many devices will not tolerate the quickie testing routers can do to change bands.

I wrote some ISY programmes to test if things were not responding and use progressive power cycling of the routers (increasing in cycle length times) and that seemed to fix most of it.

Then I got another WiFi device with remote control that I could power cycle the ISY from another country if needed. Now, I had both ends covered after a few vacations were everything was dead for two weeks and I was helpless to fix it.

Since moving, I have an ISP combo modem and, like the others, it doesn't like the frequent power blinks the utility does here. It seems ISY and polisy now tries to get an IP address from the router DHCP server and when it can't, it just gives up and disconnects. Poor design.

The fix, this time, was to get a fridge low voltage detector for polisy and when the power blinks it delays power up on my polisy for five minutes. I haven't seen that problem now for about a month since install. This allows the router to come up to speed, before polisy even tries to request an IP address.
They sell on amazon for about $15 so well worth the price.

I would love to see a sample of that program that test if things are responding. What Wifi device are you referring to exactly? I'm not following, if your home network is shot how can you communicate with this wifi device?

You could always do it the low tech way. The hardware store has some plug in digital timers that will turn things on and off based on how it's programmed.

To check your modem's uptime, could you use a site like Uptime Robot to monitor your endpoint? I know they have a free tier for running small tests like this.

Some modems have internal diagnostics accessible online. Cable modems record Downstream Power, Signal to Noise Ratio, and Upstream Power. A high upstream power value is usually the cause of many intermittent failures. Your service provider can provide you with information on the acceptable ranges for each metric recorded.

1 minute ago, matapan said:

Your service provider can provide you with information on the acceptable ranges for each metric recorded.

I don't know what service provider you use. I can't even get a simple answer to a question about my bill. Even if they had such info they would never get it. The only is if one of their techs is in your house but even then some of them are first day on the job.

I had a problem a long time ago with my modem. My service provider is Comcast. Here is what the technician disclosed during our exchange:

Downstream Power:

• ideal: -7 dBmV to +7 dBmV

• marginal: +/-10

• bad: > +/- 12

Signal to Noise Ratio:

good: > 35 dB

marginal: 30-34 dB

bad: < 30 dB

Upstream Power:

ideal: 35-50 dBmV

marginal: > 52 dBmV

bad: > 54 dBmV

I also have two homes and inevitably the "remote" one will go offline. But I was hesitant to have the eISY handle the router reboot since it has to talk to the router. My solution is just a plain old digital timer on my router. Mine are scheduled to reboot once a week in the early Sunday AM.

My current "remote" house went offline a few days ago. I am patiently waiting for Sunday to roll around.

Edited 4 hours ago4 hr by jkmcfadden