I was up too late last night to post my usual blog entry because I was desperately trying to get Internet working at home.
The problem started on Sunday night (11pm here in France, about 2pm at home). I send all my photos home for safekeeping whenever I have enough bandwidth; it took a while to get a working procedure, but now all I have to do is issue one command and everything gets copied to my desktop machine at home, which then gets backed up to Backblaze. Except that on Sunday, the backup stopped working halfway through.
A few minutes later, I started getting notifications from various services like iCloud and Ting that the house was “offline”. Frontier (our ISP) didn’t report any problems, though. It was late, and I decided to look at it on Monday.
Things were still broken on Monday morning. I asked my housesitter to take photos of the ONT (fiber modem), Ubiquiti USG router, and the Eero that Frontier included that I’m using in “bypass mode” to run the house WiFi. The Eero showed a red light (as I expected); the ONT was normal; but the Ubiquiti router had no lights on it at all – it was dead, dead, dead.
Some quick research told me that the problem with the router might be fixable, but the simplest possible solution would require re-flashing the EPROM on the router; this didn’t seem viable.
On to Plan B – take the Ubiquiti router out of the loop and connect the fiber modem directly to the Eero. I’d tried doing that when we first switched to fiber; it worked, but the Eero didn’t let me assign DNS names to local machines, and that was a pain, so I kept using the Ubiquiti router and put the Eero behind it as a dumb access point.
I still had the Eero app on my phone; I told it to put the Eero back into normal mode so it could do all of the routing for the house. Nothing happened, of course, but it didn’t give me any error messages, so I asked my housesitter to change the cabling and power cycle the Eero. A few minutes later, I started getting notifications that services were coming back online! The Eero had gone back to normal mode, and I had Internet at home. I was able to send my photos home, and all was well.
Not really. A few devices had given up the ghost when they couldn’t reach the Internet for a couple of days; I was able to get my housesitter to powercycle the most critical devices, but there are a few that will have to wait for my return. And I had to change some scripts and configuration files to use machinename.local instead of machinename or machinename.d2j.us; in one case, I had to hardcode the internal IP address of a device to make things work. I will still have a good bit of configuration cleanup to do when I get home.
And that brings me to a question – now that I’ve worked around the Eero goofiness for the most part, do I even need to replace the Ubiquiti router? Having one fewer device in the critical path seems like a good idea, and it’d save me a few hundred dollars. Decisions, decisions….