Would like some guidance for troubleshooting connectivity issues with a Smart Appliance
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@JKnott said in Would like some guidance for troubleshooting connectivity issues with a Smart Appliance:
Why do you think it's a WiFi problem? Is there some indicator that says it's failed?
I don't believe it's a WiFi problem, I suspect it's likely something related to pfsense that the device doesn't agree with. My first thought was Snort but I tried disabling it with no change... I'll try disabling snort and rebooting pfsense later today to see if the issue persists.
The units smart connectivity is built into a single USB dongle, the vendor sent me a replacement dongle under their suspicion the issue may be due to it being faulty.
It's wifi connection is strong and stable and the device remains connected to my APS when it stops responding. I've tried giving it a dedicated AP from a different vendor incase it was somehow getting roamed between APS and having issues as a result of that.
The device seems to how as online and reports the status when I press buttons on the unit but doesn't respond to changes via the app.
I'm going to do some more tinkering later today but it appears what is happening is it's able to send traffic outbound but something is happening with inbound traffic where it's not getting through all of the time. Forcing the unit to reconnect to Wifi will resolve the behaviour for ~ 15 minutes or so. -
What device exactly is this - your more likely to get help if people know excactly your working with.. Its quite possible someone here or even multiple also have said device, etc.
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@johnpoz said in Would like some guidance for troubleshooting connectivity issues with a Smart Appliance:
What device exactly is this - your more likely to get help if people know excactly your working with.. Its quite possible someone here or even multiple also have said device, etc.
It's a Midea Air Conditioner unit (Specifically a MAW12V1QWT). All of their units use the same usb dongle (Smart Kit) for wireless connectivity and control.
I was able to capture some packet data while the unit was not responding correctly within the app or to Alexa.
There were a lot of packets that were flagged as Duplicate ACK, Retransmission or even ZeroWindow during the times it was acting up. I do not currently understand TCP/IP well enough to know what those mean though. I will begin reading up on those but am hopeful someone may be able to point me in the right direction? Here is a snippet of the data I captured.
Link to the full capture.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ub1DPkhVyS2Y1pWo5KFUJl2Xh3pTfaOG/view?usp=sharing22 33.330943 54.187.154.65 192.168.5.120 TCP 188 443 → 40007 [PSH, ACK] Seq=687 Ack=853 Win=35376 Len=134 [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU]
23 33.736263 54.187.154.65 192.168.5.120 TCP 338 [TCP Retransmission] 443 → 40007 [PSH, ACK] Seq=537 Ack=853 Win=35376 Len=284
24 34.600176 54.187.154.65 192.168.5.120 TCP 338 [TCP Retransmission] 443 → 40007 [PSH, ACK] Seq=537 Ack=853 Win=35376 Len=284
25 35.094502 192.168.5.120 54.187.154.65 TCP 56 40007 → 443 [ACK] Seq=853 Ack=687 Win=7260 Len=0
26 35.141130 192.168.5.120 54.187.154.65 TCP 56 [TCP ZeroWindow] 40007 → 443 [ACK] Seq=853 Ack=821 Win=0 Len=0
27 35.141132 192.168.5.120 54.187.154.65 TCP 56 [TCP Window Update] 40007 → 443 [ACK] Seq=853 Ack=821 Win=8192 Len=0
28 35.141134 192.168.5.120 54.187.154.65 TCP 56 [TCP Dup ACK 26#1] 40007 → 443 [ACK] Seq=853 Ack=821 Win=8192 Len=0 -
Where did you sniff that? On pfsense? You can see some retrans were sent, ie device not answering..
But from that posting. Pfsense did what was suppose to and sent traffic on to client.. Client didn't answer or didn't get it?
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@johnpoz said in Would like some guidance for troubleshooting connectivity issues with a Smart Appliance:
Where did you sniff that? On pfsense? You can see some retrans were sent, ie device not answering..
But from that posting. Pfsense did what was suppose to and sent traffic on to client.. Client didn't answer or didn't get it?
This was captured on pfsense with the IF in promiscuous mode.
The TCP re transmissions seem to go both ways in the capture. From what I've read so far this could suggest packet loss but I'm not seeing any signs of packet loss on the wan IF or on my APs. Although packet loss wouldn't necessarily explain why the issues seem to occur going both directions?The full packet capture i linked to has some other odd behaviour between the client and web server.
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All of that looks like just network connectivity issues..
Again pfsense has no clue to if its wireless or wired, if it was ding something weird then all your other clients would be having sim problems.
retrans and dup are what you see when devices don't see each other replies... Your problem is not pfsense... The problem is connectivity of the device.. Be it wireless, be it the nic on the device.
Is there anyway to hardware the device? They have a wifi dongle, do they have a ethernet dongle?
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@johnpoz
Looking closer at the capture, I see the DHCP traffic in the same timeframe now.Unfortunately there isn't a way to hardwire it.
I'm however going to adjust the channel settings of my APs to see if that resolves it. If that fails I'm going to drop a hardwired AP immediately under it to see if it has any improvement. -
If you want to prove to yourself its not pfsense.. If it was pfsense the problem would be between your wan an lan.. ie traffic hit your wan in answer, but pfsense didn't send it on.. Or traffic from the device to the internet didn't get sent out the wan.
So sniff on the wan and the lan at the same time and then compare the sniff - is there traffic that is suppose to go to device that pfsense didn't send on? Is there traffic that hit pfsense lan side that didn't go out the wan?
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@johnpoz said in Would like some guidance for troubleshooting connectivity issues with a Smart Appliance:
If you want to prove to yourself its not pfsense.. If it was pfsense the problem would be between your wan an lan.. ie traffic hit your wan in answer, but pfsense didn't send it on.. Or traffic from the device to the internet didn't get sent out the wan.
So sniff on the wan and the lan at the same time and then compare the sniff - is there traffic that is suppose to go to device that pfsense didn't send on? Is there traffic that hit pfsense lan side that didn't go out the wan?
So basically do a simultaneous capture of the WAN and LAN interface and then compare the two for differences or any unusual delay such as packets getting held up by a filter ?
I'll do that next after I've tested how the device behaves with a hardwired AP with a discrete SSID stationed close to it as I can.
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Ok so I think I may have resolved the issue.
While I don't have access to the device end of things, I "Think" what's happening is that the device is not only very sensitive to any sort of 2.4ghz interference, it was trying to flip flop between WAPs and went offline for an extended period of time whenever it roamed itself.It seemed to be acting normally when I took spare ASUS router that I had in AP mode, hardwired via ethernet and placed it directly underneath if on the next floor down, giving it a dedicated SSID.
I've since adjusted the WiFi channel that the closest AP uses and created a SSID that's only on that AP which I bonded the device to. I've yet to see the behavior return over the last 19 hours since doing this. (crosses fingers)
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Well normally a device switching to an AP shouldn't cause a problem with connectivity.. Unless your AP are actually natting.. Since your device would still have the same IP just roaming between AP.
Unless sure it was having connectivity issues.
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