Hi Mark,
I just wanted to write up what happened with the Insteon Hub and my network over the last couple of weeks. I don't think there is anything wrong with the plugin or HomeTroller Plus I'm using... but there were some strange things happening!
First 2 things happened around the same time in Dec... first Cox upgraded my router to the newer 6e Wifi and everything seemed good for a couple days. Then I updated, or about the same time as the new router showed up, to HS4 4.2.16. Still no issues… then I started to notice some interesting things happening in both my wifi network as well as the Ethernet wired side. Wifi was dropping clients around the house, Nest thermostats would just go offline and not be able to reconnect… other devices like the pool controller or watering system would not be online when I went to check on them. All needed to be reset/rebooted in order to be reconnected. They would be all good for days with no issues.
Then the Insteon Hub that was plugged into the Cox router via Ethernet was also “kicked” off the router… strange?
After doing a little investigation on my own I thought the router must be a lemon… no real logs on the Cox router and it was pretty locked down so there wasn’t much to mess with. So I called Cox and they sent over a technician with a new router and he agreed that it all seemed like very strange LAN networking issues so he swapped the router and again everything seemed fine.
Now I changed nothing on my network except the new router and the HS4 update… neither should have had any effect on devices/connectivity… at least that’s what I thought.
So the new router (2nd one from Cox) seemed more stable for all the wifi devices no more drops and the 5G had good coverage and speed.
But there was still this issue with the Insteon Hub being dropped by the router after anywhere from a few to several hours… sometimes in the middle of running an event it would just drop off the network. The HomeTroller Plus had no issues… it was plugged in right next to the Insteon Hub on the router on an Ethernet port… all hard wired.
The only configuration change I made was that this router did not allow access to port blocking or web site blocking to keep the Insteon Hub from trying to connect to its servers… so I had to use Cox’s app to “pause” it from using the internet… it seemed to work the led went back to red.
I still have never done a factory reset on the hub… so I don’t know if that would have made a difference. But I couldn’t keep the hub on the network! Most of the time I would only needed to restart the Insteon plugin in HS4 and it would reconnect to HS4 and work just fine for some random period before again being kicked off the router. I tried new cables, different ports, using a Ethernet switch to connect the HS4 and Hub together and then the switch to the router… all resulted in the same behavior. Then I started to notice after about ever 3rd or 4th restart of the plugin that the hub would not come back at all. And a restart of the router would need to happen before anything would work.
Now there are no logs to speak of from the Cox router… System, Event, and Firewall are it… and none of them showed anything as far as why the hub was not being allowed to reconnect to the network. The Firewall log did show the hub trying to connect to the internet and the Insteon Home servers but it was being blocked by the “pause” I had in place.
At this point I pulled out my old router which had very good features and logging and hooked up just the HS4 Plus and the Insteon Hub to it… no issues at all! Ok so maybe the Cox device isn’t really a router and for some reason thinks that the Insteon Hub is trying to hack or misbehave on the network in some way. And so I does what it thinks is the right thing and closes down communication to/from that port? After several days of this investigation and fiddling around I was just happy to have Homeseer and Insteon back working together again.
So I gave up connecting both the HomeTroller Plus and the Hub to the Cox router, or whatever it is. I configured the wifi on the Plus to connect to the Cox router and used the Pluses Ethernet port configured for a different LAN IP to communicate only to the Insteon Hub. Homeseer seems happy and can communicate to the rest of the wifi, z-wave, etc devices on my home network and the Homeseer can talk to the Insteon Hub when it needs to via its Ethernet port.
I just wanted to write this up for you since this might come up in the future with Cox’s new routers.
Thanks for all you help, Kevin
I just wanted to write up what happened with the Insteon Hub and my network over the last couple of weeks. I don't think there is anything wrong with the plugin or HomeTroller Plus I'm using... but there were some strange things happening!
First 2 things happened around the same time in Dec... first Cox upgraded my router to the newer 6e Wifi and everything seemed good for a couple days. Then I updated, or about the same time as the new router showed up, to HS4 4.2.16. Still no issues… then I started to notice some interesting things happening in both my wifi network as well as the Ethernet wired side. Wifi was dropping clients around the house, Nest thermostats would just go offline and not be able to reconnect… other devices like the pool controller or watering system would not be online when I went to check on them. All needed to be reset/rebooted in order to be reconnected. They would be all good for days with no issues.
Then the Insteon Hub that was plugged into the Cox router via Ethernet was also “kicked” off the router… strange?
After doing a little investigation on my own I thought the router must be a lemon… no real logs on the Cox router and it was pretty locked down so there wasn’t much to mess with. So I called Cox and they sent over a technician with a new router and he agreed that it all seemed like very strange LAN networking issues so he swapped the router and again everything seemed fine.
Now I changed nothing on my network except the new router and the HS4 update… neither should have had any effect on devices/connectivity… at least that’s what I thought.
So the new router (2nd one from Cox) seemed more stable for all the wifi devices no more drops and the 5G had good coverage and speed.
But there was still this issue with the Insteon Hub being dropped by the router after anywhere from a few to several hours… sometimes in the middle of running an event it would just drop off the network. The HomeTroller Plus had no issues… it was plugged in right next to the Insteon Hub on the router on an Ethernet port… all hard wired.
The only configuration change I made was that this router did not allow access to port blocking or web site blocking to keep the Insteon Hub from trying to connect to its servers… so I had to use Cox’s app to “pause” it from using the internet… it seemed to work the led went back to red.
I still have never done a factory reset on the hub… so I don’t know if that would have made a difference. But I couldn’t keep the hub on the network! Most of the time I would only needed to restart the Insteon plugin in HS4 and it would reconnect to HS4 and work just fine for some random period before again being kicked off the router. I tried new cables, different ports, using a Ethernet switch to connect the HS4 and Hub together and then the switch to the router… all resulted in the same behavior. Then I started to notice after about ever 3rd or 4th restart of the plugin that the hub would not come back at all. And a restart of the router would need to happen before anything would work.
Now there are no logs to speak of from the Cox router… System, Event, and Firewall are it… and none of them showed anything as far as why the hub was not being allowed to reconnect to the network. The Firewall log did show the hub trying to connect to the internet and the Insteon Home servers but it was being blocked by the “pause” I had in place.
At this point I pulled out my old router which had very good features and logging and hooked up just the HS4 Plus and the Insteon Hub to it… no issues at all! Ok so maybe the Cox device isn’t really a router and for some reason thinks that the Insteon Hub is trying to hack or misbehave on the network in some way. And so I does what it thinks is the right thing and closes down communication to/from that port? After several days of this investigation and fiddling around I was just happy to have Homeseer and Insteon back working together again.
So I gave up connecting both the HomeTroller Plus and the Hub to the Cox router, or whatever it is. I configured the wifi on the Plus to connect to the Cox router and used the Pluses Ethernet port configured for a different LAN IP to communicate only to the Insteon Hub. Homeseer seems happy and can communicate to the rest of the wifi, z-wave, etc devices on my home network and the Homeseer can talk to the Insteon Hub when it needs to via its Ethernet port.
I just wanted to write this up for you since this might come up in the future with Cox’s new routers.
Thanks for all you help, Kevin
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