Hey guys, hopefully someone can help me out here. Support has gone silent over the past few days.
I’ve been trying to get my Rachio Gen 2 to connect to the Rachio AWS servers for weeks now with no luck. I’ve done firmware updates, reset to factory defaults etc on my equipment and on the Rachio). I’ve even tested two different Rachio Gen 2s, with the same result. I was able to show that the only device being used was the R7000 for the router and for wifi, could show that it was on a 2.4Ghz channel, and even placed it in the DMZ and could see the world trying to port scan it - so it was sitting on the internet, and still couldn’t connect. Figured maybe my ISP was blocking the required ports…but nope - tested that too, more on that below.
So, I can see that the Rachio is pulling an IP address (because I know it’s MAC address) and is on my LAN, but it makes no attempt to go outside of my network. I know this because I’ve done numerous different Wireshark traces (using a port mirror on the switch that goes to the router - in this scenario I was not soley using the R7000, since I couldn’t do a packet capture on it), all with the same result. I’ve even swapped out Routers. Initially I had a Netgear R7000, and thought maybe that was the cause, since I COULD get the Rachio to connect if using my phone as a mobile hotspot (purely a test and I couldn’t actually leave it that way), but it did show that in that scenario the Rachio could connect. The issue that I had though was that I could show that I could resolve DNS queries externally using my router or 8.8.8.8 or whatever, through my router, resolving to their servers (mqtt.rach.io). Since I could do that and since I could port query TCP 8883 on those same servers, ports / connectivity didn’t appear to be an issue - something else is still the cause.
PS C:\Users\eric> Test-NetConnection -ComputerName mqtt.rach.io -Port 8883
ComputerName : mqtt.rach.io
RemoteAddress : 52.32.13.229
RemotePort : 8883
InterfaceAlias : Wi-Fi
SourceAddress : 192.168.x.x
TcpTestSucceeded : True
The same port tests worked via my ISP (Verizon FIOS) and via my Mobile Hotspot (also Verizon).
Just in case though…figured I’ve already spent so much time on it, lets throw some money at the problem, so I bought a Ubiquiti USG Pro (since you can’t do a packet captures on the R7000 natively, and since I have no Netgear support, and since I wanted to buy one anyway ). Unfortunately the Rachio still couldn’t connect using the new router (also not blocking anything outbound and can also connect to the required ports and can resolve their AWS cloud based servers), but in doing the wireshark traces I don’t see the Rachio even attempt to leave my network. It pulls an IP address from my router, broadcasts some ARP traffic, does an IPV6 multicast tries to do some more ARP traffic, and then the process starts over again. No attempt to query DNS, which it’d need to do to find the servers, to connect via the required ports.
The unfortunate part is that I don’t have a working Wireshark trace to use as a baseline for comparison. I’ve asked Rachio for one since it’s an easy Repro, but I’ve go no response. If anyone out there wants to reset their Rachio Gen 2 to Factory Defaults and then do a Wireshark trace doing the initial add operation, that’d be awesome - any takers ?
I just need to figure out how to do a tcpdump or network trace on my Galaxy S7, so I can have that baseline.
The other unfortunate part is that there’s no way to SSH or console to the Rachio to look at any sort of logging.
The only thing that I noticed when doing the port testing via my ISP vs using my phone as a mobile hotspot is that when using the hotspot, it appeared to be using the IPV6 address - which should have no bearing from a port perspective, but maybe from a routing perspective? Not sure I don’t have a background in networking.
Anyhow, if anyone has any ideas, I’m happy to hear them, as I’d love to figure out root cause.
Thanks,
Eric