Drayton Wiser Home Assistant Integration

darcey · October 5, 2022, 9:37am

@msp1974 Sorry, but I had to create a new post for the second image.
This may also be helpful. In my case, HA and the hub are on different subnets. So the state tracking in pfsense gives an indication of waiting tcp connections:

LGO44 · October 5, 2022, 10:50am

I have an issue this morning.

the system restarted normally after about 35 minutes.

After that, I’ve made some traces Wireshark that shows many connections opened and closed in about 6 minutes.

@msp1974 @jamiebennett ,If we consider that as a “vulnerable to DoS attack”, it should be understood like a cybersecurity issue that could be noticed to Schneider Electric.

darcey · October 5, 2022, 11:06am

@LGO44 it was your first post re tcp connections that prompted me to look at it. As I understand it, http1.0 does not support persistent connections (whereas http 1.1 does). So, if the hub’s webserver is http1.0, we have to see a new tcp connection per http request and the integration cannot use keep-alive. I’m not familiar with the python libraries here, but may be this will be the case with a lot of HA integrations and low-power low-spec IOT devices.

jamiebennett · October 5, 2022, 11:09am

Hi LG044,

We are still looking into why some people are seeing WiFi dropouts but on the Cyber Security part, we have to remember that if you flood your local network and essentially try to DDoS your own device, it will most likely not work as intended. From outside of the local network this shouldn’t be possible as the Wiser Hub doesn’t have a public IP address and to make extra sure, you need the secret key that only the user should know. I’ll talk with the team to see if there is anything we can do to try stop overuse of the local http port by accident but in general, even though you can use it for integrations like HA (which is great), it isn’t officially supported.

robertwigley · October 5, 2022, 11:49am

I think the next step in this investigation is to remove the integration and just monitor the hub with a ping sensor to see if the problem still occurs. @msp1974 I think you said that you have a second hub? Is this something you are able to test? If not, I can (reluctantly) remove the integration and test this.

Alternatively, rather than removing the integration (as I spent a lot of time renaming entities etc), is it possible to disable polling? i.e. if I select System Options and then toggle ‘Enable polling for updates’ to off, will this stop the integration from polling the hub, which effectively will be the same as removing the integration.

msp1974 · October 5, 2022, 12:25pm

I can and have setup them up next to each other, bound to the same mesh node, with same monitoring sensors. However, mine hasn’t dropped out now for 5 days, so whether I will see anything or not is to be determined.

Anyway, they can stay like that for as long as is necessary.

Just to share my Wi-Fi setup with everyone also:

Router: 2 x Asus RT-AX92U
Mesh - Yes - Asus AIMesh supporting 1 x 5ghz and 1 x 2.4ghz
Connected on 2.4ghz channel 13 (fixed not auto)
No other Wi-Fi signals on this channel and 2 zigbee networks (this + 1) both on channel 11 - no issues
IPs: DHCP assigned static addresses
Hub Connections: Back of house node and bound to that node
Master Unit: Front of house
Node: Back of house connected over 5GHz reserved channel
House construction - mix of brick and partition walls (1920s house with mods)
Total of 29 things connected (25 on Wi-Fi as mix of 5gz and 2.4ghz).

msp1974 · October 5, 2022, 12:26pm

Just disable it - 3 dots on integration tile. This was it will keep everything when you re-enable.

EDIT: Or change IP address in config and accept errors in logs

msp1974 · October 5, 2022, 12:45pm

The hub does support http/1.1 however it sends a connection close in the response header which requests/urllib3 respects and closes the connection.

dunxd · October 5, 2022, 5:30pm

I had already started tracking the signal strength seen by the Hub (blue line below) and the signal strength the AP sees from the Hub (purple line).

The signal fluctuates between -70 and -82 dB. HA can only record the signal strength reported by the Hub when it is online, but the breaks in the purple line correspond to outages, which are red in the histogram above. I had two outages this morning - about 40mins at 2am and 40 mins at around 9am. I am on 3.1.7 and power cycled the hub a couple of days ago.

The outages don’t appear to correspond to large drops in the signal strength - it often stays connected at times when the signal is weaker either side of the outage. As mentioned previously, for a variety of reasons the signal strength isn’t ideal, so I don’t know that my case should be seen as representative.

Oh - I’ve also started tracking the AP the hub connects to in case it is jumping around. I just did this, so waiting to see what happens at the next disconnection.

msp1974 · October 5, 2022, 5:49pm

So, in between doing actual work, I have been trying to think why my hub maybe now more stable and others not. So, the other thing I did was fix the channel and not leave on auto.

Anyway, been playing around with this and I have twice now been able to make my hub loose Wi-Fi connection and not reconnect (both times solid red light). The very weird thing is that my other ‘test’ hub that is now sat on top of it, did drop its connection when changes made (as expected), but reconnected straight away.

So what I did to cause it to happen. I was switching between 20Mhz channel bandwidth and 24/40Mhz and also switching between auto and fixed channels. Haven’t quite nailed exactly what changes made it twice drop off and not recover but will keep working on that. For some of these changes it did recover quickly like the test hub. Both times, putting it into and out of setup mode brought it back online (albeit it one time I switched to setup and back within a couple of seconds and it did not - doing again for 10 secs in setup mode before switching back did recover it).

So this leaves me wondering if this is maybe a channel hopping related issue. Many people seem to have a good Wi-Fi setup and these routers maybe do channel hopping in auto rather than just pick one at start up. Or it could be that when doing these changes, Wi-Fi goes off and on again and this kicking the hub off is causing it to not be able to reconnect in some instances.

For those having issues, 2 questions:

Do you have fixed or auto channel selection on 2.4ghz?
Do you have 20Mhz or 20/40Mhz channel bandwidth set?

I think most stable option is probably fixed channel and 20Mhz bandwidth (more than adequate for most 2.4ghz devices) and the basic of config. For note, last 5 days with no drops, my router has been on 20/40mhz but fixed channel 13.

@jamiebennett maybe this might help isolate the issue. But why one does it and the other not - I have no idea. The test one has no ZigBee devices connected, is a 2 channel rather than a 1 channel for my main one and both have same firmware version. Both are currently linked to my production HA running on 30s updates and sat next to each other now bound to same Wi-Fi mesh node. Also to note, when it comes back online via setup mode on/off tcp respawn count has increased on the main one. Test one still has 0 respawns.

jamiebennett · October 5, 2022, 6:13pm

Thanks for the all the investigations. Channel hopping, Mesh networks and handoffs, and DHCP lease renewals are a few areas we are exploring but the comments around multiple connections has led us to believe that this is also an area which we can implement code slightly differently which should help. I personally will have a new build from the team shortly implementing a persistent connection approach to see if that helps, will report back when I know more. The original implementation was done like that to be more efficient but it doesn’t cater as well for the HA use case of opening connections every 30 seconds.

mgb66 · October 5, 2022, 6:23pm

My WiFi is set as 20/40 Hz, fixed channel 6. The hub is bound to a specific mesh unit.

Scoff · October 5, 2022, 6:27pm

Not sure if it’s any use or not, but I’m happy to setup a ping monitor against my hub to see if I get any drop outs or not. All I have is the hub and room thermostat. I haven’t installed any TRVs yet as waiting to fit new valves. I haven’t set up the HA integration yet either until I have all my TRVs working with the main Wiser app.

I’ve not seen any sign of red lights on my hub, or any connectivity issues in the Wiser app on my phone, but haven’t been monitoring all day (obviously!).

Just thought it may help by seeing if there are any dropouts with regular numbers of opening connections?

dunxd · October 5, 2022, 6:35pm

I have auto channel selection turned off on my Access Points, and the channel width is set to 20 MHz.

The only time a channel change might happen in my network is if the hub switches AP for any reason (e.g. an AP goes offline, or there is enough interference in the channel that the Hub decides to reconnect to a different AP. I am monitoring for the hub changing AP as of today.

msp1974 · October 5, 2022, 6:47pm

That would be great thx

Scoff · October 5, 2022, 7:47pm

No problem. I’ve set my ping monitor running against my hub and I’ll leave it running for the foreseeable. I’ve created email alerts should the host go offline, and I’ll keep an eye on it throughout the day tomorrow, and report findings as and when. I can leave it running for a few days to try to capture any drop outs. If anything is picked up I will post my relatively simple WiFi setup details and house construction etc as others have done.

sebbaT · October 5, 2022, 9:06pm

I’m using a fixed channel (1) and 20Mhz. 2 channel hub here also.

LGO44 · October 5, 2022, 9:58pm

I had auto channel selection and I move it to channel 6
I had 20/40 Mhz selection and I move it to 20Mhz

I also use the device tracker provided by Synology SRM
template:

sensor:
- name: “Tracker Wiserheat03 Status signal strength”
  state: >
  {{ state_attr(‘device_tracker.wiserheat03xxxx’,‘signal_strength’) }}
sensor:
- name: “Tracker Wiserheat03 Status rate quality”
  state: >
  {{ state_attr(‘device_tracker.wiserheat03xxxx’,‘rate_quality’) }}
sensor:
- name: “Tracker Wiserheat03 Status current rate”
  state: >
  {{ state_attr(‘device_tracker.wiserheat03xxxx’,‘current_rate’) }}

robertwigley · October 5, 2022, 11:28pm

Do you have fixed or auto channel selection on 2.4ghz?
Fixed (Channel 11)
Do you have 20Mhz or 20/40Mhz channel bandwidth set?
20MHz

My 2.4GHz WiFi is basically for legacy devices and IoT stuff, so I try and keep it as backward compatible as possible.

msp1974 · October 6, 2022, 12:04am

Ok seems like many have fixed channel, so maybe it is more related to being kicked off/dropped wifi that it cannot reconnect for some reason.