I’ve just switched over to the Alta Labs (1 x AP6 and 3 x AP6-Pro). All are POE driven and network hardwire connected.
I’ve moved / am moving from four Eero 6E’s and really hoping any struggles I have with the Alta Labs can be rectified because I’d really like to navigate away from the Eero’s. I will say that their service to my wireless devices has been stable and solid (but not without its growing pains either).
I’m having a couple of issues that I can’t seem to work around. I run a number of Blink XT cameras and they connect to a Blink Sync Module. My modules are unable to join the network.
I’ve created a new SSID and enabled only the 2GHz channel, as I’ve seen similar behavior before with clients that don’t support the 5GHz space, but I still cannot get them to join the network. The module is erroring out with a ‘unable to connect to network’. This happens pretty quickly after going through the setup process, so I have to imagine the module is getting back a failure pretty quickly. Any ideas here?
Additionally, it seems like I’ve had to disable fast roaming as a number of my other wireless devices (namely some Amazon Echoes) were having significant buffering issues. I would have thought some of the more recent Echo’s I have would have been considered ‘of age’ devices and could leverage fast roaming, but it seems perhaps not.
I also have some smart outlets that would continually choose the wrong AP’s and have terrible signal. This seems to be mostly cleared up with disabling of the Fast Switching as well. There are still some devices that are choosing an illogical device. is there a method to pin devices to specific AP’s?
We do have some Blink cameras in our test labs, and haven’t encountered any of the issues you are seeing, but we’re happy to look into what is going on there. If you can invite me to your site (I’ll DM you my email), I can take a look at your logs and/or grab some packet captures.
Because there are some devices that frankly are not compatible with multiple APs (regardless of the AP vendor), the recommended way to pin a device to an AP (and/or band) is to create a separate SSID specifically for that AP and/or band (think “MyWiFi-Garage-5Ghz”, etc.).
These devices were connected to my Eero’s fine (I did have to disable the 5GHz band to get them joined). I tried to emulate this in the way I think the Alta’s are expecting it to be, which is to mean I created a separate SSID with only the 2GHz radio active and had it join that during setup. That failed in a similar fashion.
With regards to pinning, this makes sense. With some of these ‘finicky’ devices (smart outlets are a big one in this space for me), the process of changing WiFi is tedious. Are there any intentions of making pinning something more streamlined from the Device management in the GUI?
I understand the software development process can be painful, so this is more of a curiosity than anything else.
I see many Amazon and a couple Blinks connected currently. Are you having issues right now?
It’s possible we’ll add a streamlined pinning to the UI, but in our experience, that can actually cause more problems than solving them. Some devices get really sticky to an AP they think they need to join, and us forcing them to an AP doesn’t actually work. Having a separate SSID is much more likely to eliminate problems.
I responded to the email sent by this platform, by mistake, so recopying data here!
I am definitely still having issues with the blink devices. Here are to MAC’s that should be showing up for the Sync Modules, assuming there’s local logging. My last attempt to join them was last night very late.
0003.7F59.9FA2
74AB.9353.912C
Neither of the modules will connect to the network (red LED after selecting the SSID they should connect to).
MAC ending in 9FA2 would be closest to either Garage or Office AP’s (they’re close and separated by a different amount of walls of differing material; one is Pro and one is not).
MAC ending in 912C is definitely closest to the Office AP.
My last connection attempt was done yesterday. Let me perform another one right now. Just in case its a roll off of logging. Give me two minutes and I’ll try with the device with MAC ending in 912C. I get a ‘Incorrect Password’ after the discovery process and joining to my SSID. At this point the module just sits in an errored state and I have to restart it to try the process again. I’ve tried this process a few times over the last 24 hours.
I’ve also got a case open with Blink as I have zero insights there unfortunately (yaay locked down environments).
If you ssh to each of the APs, you can look at the /var/log/messages* files. You can also enable remote syslog to forward the logs to a syslog server of your choice.
I’m just grepping these log files for those MAC addresses, and I’m not seeing anything come up.
A device which IS connected (also a Sync module) called ‘Sync Module (G2 Rear)’ has an IP connected to Office AP. Searching for the MAC in the syslog doesn’t show anything there.
Would I only see ‘new connections’ in the syslog for recent attempts for connection?
Sorry for the beginning questions; still familiarizing myself.
Just to close some of the loop here. I swapped out to two brand new sync modules and they registered just fine. There’s clearly something being cached on these ‘legacy’ modules that was preventing them from connecting to the Blink servers via the wireless network.
I’ll post a final update to this thread once Blink Support gets back with me.
Fascinating! Thanks for the follow up. As far as MAC addresses in the logs, if they connected hours ago and you have a busy network, they may have fallen outside of the normal log windows. If you really want to sift through everything, you’re probably best off installing a syslog server.
Closing the loop on this. Turns out this is the process required for these modules when they get ‘grumpy’:
First, unplug the Service Module (SM) and wait 30 seconds.
For this next step, you will need a pin or paperclip handy. While your SM is unplugged, press and hold down the reset button on the right side of the Sync Module, then plug it back into power without releasing the reset button.
Continue holding that reset button until you see a flashing red light on the SM.
Once you’ve seen the flashing red light, you can release the reset button.
After resetting the SM, wait patiently (about a minute at the most) for the solid blue light to change back into a solid green blinking blue light pattern. This pattern means the firmware has been reset on the SM, and it is ready to reconnect to the Wi-Fi network.
Tap on the Sync Module icon located at the bottom of the home page in the Blink app, then select the Change Wi-Fi Network option from the list displayed. Or, if your Sync Module has already been deleted from the app, go ahead and try re-adding it to your system.
Looks like these modules get something stuck in cache and requires a factory reset (different than a ‘regular reset’, which includes pressing the reset button until the LED flashes red from an already power on state), to get it shook loose.
They (Blink) actually provided the solution to me, after some resistance to keep attempting the ‘regular reset’ I already knew about. Required a good deal of dialog to press them into giving me the ‘next thing to try’.
Thankfully I found an end to their testing steps and it actually worked!
