App notifications turn themselves off (Android)

[Eric Meeson]

This was an issue I remember coming up a while ago, but hadn't happened in quite a while.

Today after realizing it was weird to have had absolutely no notifications all day, I looked and they had been disabled again. This is obviously a problem since no notifications undermines security pretty badly.

Could this have been caused by last night's software update interacting strangely? Upon looking back, desktop notifications with Chrome did continue working, as I got an offline/online notification cycle several times (my Wyze cams onsite continued working the whole time though) so I can't be sure, but I expect it was ISP related given how overloaded they all are right now.

[Eric Meeson]

I'll add that I started experiencing video dropouts (black sections in timeline) of about 1 minute each system-wide at around 8 this morning. It's definitely the driveway camera worse than any of the others (several dropouts per hour) but the others do seem to flicker off every once and a while as well. Visible log screen output from a plugged in monitor looks the same as always, and nothing in the system configuration (cameras or network hardware) has changed in at least a month. Dropouts only started this morning.

[CamectArup]

What type of notifications are we talking about? Android app notification, telegram, or email? 

The software update is not supposed to have changed anything about your notifications. Are the notifications working now, or still not? We are aware of one bug (not yet fixed) where Camect could fail to switch out of home mode when your phone leaves the network, although it does not sound like that's what happened here. 

Re: blackouts ... are we talking about Wyze cams, or something else? We have seen Wyze cams get into funky states where they'll keep falling off the network (or at least Wyze will tell us they're off the network when we attempt to reconnect). If it's any other type of camera, use Report Bug and mention some specific times we should check on. 

 

[CamectArup]

Chao told me you're probably talking about android notifications. There's a problem there where Google will eventually expire the subscription to notifications, and we need to get you to reauthorize it. He's looking into what we can do about that, either to get you to reauthorize before it expires, or at least to warn you when it needs to be done. 

[Eric Meeson]

Okay thanks. I knew the notifications thing had happened before and I thought I remembered Chao saying it was sorted, but apparently I misunderstood. A warning would be awesome, and yes it was Android notifications. I really should set up Telegram and give that a go.

As far as blackouts go, this is happening on POE Lorex Cameras that had been working fine up until yesterday. The Wyze cams have also had some significant dropouts, but I really have no complaints about a $20 wifi camera being cranky. I'm used to them going on and offline at a whim, that has always been the case with those.

The only other oddity there was last night when I checked on things, I had a Wyze cam that I could view live no problem, but had a large black spot in the timeline that ran all the way up to the live view I was watching. I zoomed the timeline down to 3 minutes and left it open for a while, and it still didn't fill any of the timeline with recorded footage despite watching the camera live (the Wyze timestamp was updating so I know it wasn't frozen). Refreshing the page also left a black timeline during the period that I was actively watching the live stream from that Wyze camera.

I did reboot the system yesterday (UI remote reboot) and the dropouts persist. I'll get out to the site tomorrow to see if I can find anything on the network health. Upon closer inspection while writing this post they seem to be tied to a particular switch, though all cameras on that switch aren't going out at the same time, and the dropouts are mostly confined to one camera.

Looks like I have some hardware debugging to do, I'll probably just replace that switch as a first level diagnostic. I added the dropouts to my post in case anyone else was having an issue, because it seemed correlated with yesterday's update since it's otherwise behaved itself this past month.