I have two homes that I manage, each with their own home assistant on raspberry pi 4b with 4gb ram. In the one home, every time I reboot the mesh routers, home assistant loses network connection and I am unable to access home assistant. Here are the hardware and software configurations for each home:
Home 1, which works fine:
Fibre ONT connected directly to Google wifi mesh router system
For Home 2, when i reboot the LTE router ON ITS OWN, it does not cause a problem. When I reboot LTE router, mesh router system and home assistant ALL AT THE SAME TIME, it does not cause a problem (probably because the sequence of booting happens to work out). When I reboot the mesh routers ON THEIR OWN, then home assistant is unable to regain network connectivity once the mesh routers have rebooted - meanwhile, all other devices on my home network restore network connectivity.
If I switch Home 2’s home assistant to get an IP address dynamically instead of as a static address, and then I reserve the IP address 192.168.86.2 on the mesh wifi system, this fixes the problem.
I suspect that the problem lies with using static IP address on Home Assistant while using a network with 2 routers (despite 1 router being in bridge mode). Anyone else experience something similar, or can comment on this?
Is there any way to tell the Ausu system that you have assigned a static IP to the Pi (some systems have this capability), otherwise I would say its just a ‘outlier’ interaction between the Pi and the Ausu WiFi which you probably have no hope of getting resolved. I would just go with the solution you already have, unless you have some desperate need for the Pi to have a manual static IP ?
I see quite a few others with different routers having similar problem.
The Asus onhub mesh wifi uses the same firmware and software as the Google mesh wifi that I’m using in the other home that doesn’t have this problem.
I’m continuing to use dhcp with reserved ip address, but thought it good to put this out there in the forums so others can see it and comment on it, or at the very least, learn from it
I see a lot of people posting issues about mesh WiFi in general. These systems are trying to make it easier for average consumers to manage increasingly complex home networks. They do this by taking away control from the user and making the systems ‘smarter’. This is probably better overall, but causes a lot more edge case user problems as the interactions between ‘smart’ systems becomes increasingly complex.
Hard over on the other side are full enterprise networking solutions where you get to control everything yourself (more or less), but obviously these are out of reach for the majority of users.
The issue is ubiquitous complexity in home networking. I have more devices on my home network today than the company I was working for had 10 years ago on their enterprise network. However, we as home users expect everything to ‘just keep working’ as we add more and more devices (complexity) to our ecosystems. ‘Smarter’ routers, WiFi AP etc. are the consumer industry answer to this, but most enterprise network managers would not touch any of this kit with a bargepole…