I recently migrated from a 802.11b\/g\/n mesh network with a base and two satellites to two standalone 802.11a\/b\/g\/n\/ac\/ax access points. The reason for going from mesh to a two separate standalone APs was due in part to housing downsize and separating IoT, guests, and questionable devices from my personal, trusted, devices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Shortly after making the migration I started noticing frequent, but random disconnects on the 2.4GHz network on the IoT AP for about half a dozen devices. There are approximately 50 devices connected on this AP in total, so having 6 of them disconnect randomly seemed a bit odd. To make things even more interesting, these 6 devices would not automatically reconnect after they disconnect. Seems like a mystery is brewing, and I love a good mystery!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I started digging into the mystery by making sure the AP had the latest firmware (it did) and confirmed the configuration settings were correct (they were.) Then I tried to identify anything in common between the 6 devices (they were all TP-Link Kasa smart devices.) I thought maybe one of the Kasa devices were malfunctioning and started taking them offline one at a time. No dice! The problem persisted!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I continued my investigation trying various other things such as reducing the Wi-Fi protocol to only older ones and a bunch of other things. None of this really made much difference outside of slowing down the disconnect rate of the 6 devices. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Eventually I decided something else must be going on so I set up logging on the AP and had the logs shipped to a machine on my network that runs rsyslog. I went through the logs and discovered something that was not visible in the APs interface nor in the normal event logs: there was a unknown device attempting to connect about once per second but failing to complete the connection. Looking up the MAC address revealed that is was manufactured by “Tuya Smart Inc.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Knowing the manufacturer didn’t really help that much other than tell me it was some sort of “smart” device. The next step was a process of elemination where I went throughout the house unplugging every smart device for a few minutes at a time by either unplugging them, which did not reveal the mystery device, or by turning the breakers off in the electrical box. I eventually narrowed things down to one room. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Once I began looking at what was present and plugged in, I realized there was a \u201csmart\u201d thermometer on the wall in this room. As it turns out, this thing has Wi-Fi, and was not connecting correctly. After removing the power (AC and batteries) the constant connection attempts on the AP completely stopped. The reason this went unnoticed for months was because I do not use the app associated with this “smart” thermometer, but my spouse occasionally does. Apparently she hadn’t used it for a few months to notice it wasn’t working any longer…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I ended up doing a factory reset on the \u201csmart\u201d thermometer, reconfigured it, and it has been behaving fine since (a few years now).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mystery solved!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I recently migrated from a 802.11b\/g\/n mesh network with a base and two satellites to two standalone 802.11a\/b\/g\/n\/ac\/ax access points. The reason for going from mesh to a two separate standalone APs was due in part to housing downsize and separating IoT, guests, and questionable devices from my personal, trusted, devices. Shortly after making the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":182,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.canutethegreat.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.canutethegreat.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.canutethegreat.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.canutethegreat.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.canutethegreat.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blog.canutethegreat.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":188,"href":"https:\/\/blog.canutethegreat.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions\/188"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.canutethegreat.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.canutethegreat.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.canutethegreat.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.canutethegreat.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}