Anyone running their Insteon Hub (2245-222) with a Green LED?

[W4WN]

Just wondering if anyone has left their Insteon Hub (2245-222) open to internet access (Green LED) and had any issues with Insteon pushing down anything that breaks HS4-MNS?
The reason I ask is I have a couple extra Hubs with older firmware that's prior to the 1019 version. There were some connection stability issues that were fixed after the 1017 version. I'm tempted to open one up to the internet and let it 'phone home' to see if it'll do an update without an Insteon subscription....
According to the Insteon web page (for what that's worth) it says 1019 from 4/2020 is the latest.

[claude]

I had blocked my Hub from accessing several Insteon related sites:

1 http://prod.insteon.pubnub.com
2 http://connect.insteon.com
3 http://pubnub.com
4 http://hubstatus.insteon.com

The Hub's light has been red with those ... until recently. It went green continuously. So I added the following restriction today:

5 http://pubsub.pubnub.com

I'll see in a few days if the light is still green.

[mnsandler]

I have asked the insteon team (via Ken) to not make any fw changes that would break my API connection to the hub. I believe if you no longer have an active subscription, they shouldn't be contacting your hub with updates; but who knows.

[claude]

Hub's light till green after 4 days.

Ran Insteon Hub Connection Diagnostics. All seven single beeps. So steps 4 to 7 being successful would mean the Hub is still able to communicate with Insteon servers, regardless of my router URL blocks. I'll do a network trace when I get a chance to see what other Web site the Hub is talking to.

[mnsandler]

I created one firewall rule to block the hub local IP from internet/wan access completely. this works for me.

[claude]

I created one firewall rule to block the hub local IP from internet/wan access completely. this works for me.

Great that it works for you Mark. The router provided by my Internet supplier won't allow blocking a local IP from the Internet. It only allows blocking URLs, thus the list.

I know I could set that router in pass-through mode and insert my own router downstream, but it also introduces an additional point of failure or debugging.

[W4WN]

An update: My test Hub has been exposed to the internet with green LED since 12/29/22 with no Insteon firmware or any negative impact to MNS connectivity.

Note that I'm just doing this to see if Insteon would update the Hub's firmware - I'm not at all suggesting anyone should expose HS4/MNS Hubs to the internet.

[mnsandler]

An update: My test Hub has been exposed to the internet with green LED since 12/29/22 with no Insteon firmware or any negative impact to MNS connectivity.

Note that I'm just doing this to see if Insteon would update the Hub's firmware - I'm not at all suggesting anyone should expose HS4/MNS Hubs to the internet.

thanks for the update.