Trouble Connecting to Brennan UI

[Arthur Good]

Suddenly was unable to load the UI on my iPad. Tried my Samsung Galaxy S21 and had no luck there either. My Brennan B2 showed that I was connected to WiFi and I went through the re-connect process to be sure  and it connected just fine. The address is different than the one I originally set up with my B2, so I entered the address from the scrolling screen on the B2 and the page doesn’t load. Eventually, I get a message to the effect “unable to reach server”. Did a backup and save, turned the unit off and then on with the same result. Is there something I am missing? 

[fred.w....@gmail.com]

Sorry too many spelling mistakes, here it is again.

---------------------

Yes, you are missing something :-)

It is the Job of your House's Router to connect things up and to give your B2 its IP number.

When you boot the B2 it tries to connect to the Router and asks the Router for an IP number. 

What IP number is issued is down to the Router to decide, the B2 is entirely passive in the process. 

When the B2 is issued an IP number the B2 sits there waiting for traffic to come to it from the Router.

Thus when you connect your PC/Phone/Tablet to your House's WiFi (this too gets given an IP number by the Router) and you start a Browser session on your PC/Phone/Tablet and type in the B2's IP number,  the House router's job is to connect your

Browser's session to that IP number so that the B2's web UI can be sent to your  PC/Phone/Tablet.

Potentially therefore each time you boot your B2 it could be given a different IP number by the router and this makes life difficult to remember how to get to the B2.

To overcome this it is possible, from the Router's Admin pages, to tell the Router to always give the SAME IP number to the B2. Each router has a different way of achieving this but nearly all Routers DO provide this function. 

If you tell us which make model your router is we may be able to advise you on how to do this (it is called Reserving an IP address).

Anyhow I think that you can now see why you were having the problems you were.

It is also sometimes a good thing to power off your House Router and then power it up again, as sometimes they get "confused" (You rebooted the B2 rather than the Router).

Invariably if the B2 is showing an IP number and your WiFi signal strength is good (sometimes it is not!!) then, if you can not get to the B2 this is NOT the B2's Fault, it is the Router or your PC/Phone/Tablet that are the problem.

Hope this helps

Fred

[Arthur Good]

Thanks so much, Fred. I took your advice and re-booted my router, which is an ASUS RT-AX86S, just installed last November. I tried reaching the UI with my Samsung cellphone (the mobile version) and it worked like a charm. However, when I retried the iPAD, a partial outline of the UI appeared after some time and ultimately, the screen went blank with a message of “cannot open page” because “server stopped responding “. Starting to wonder if my iPAD may be the issue. It’s probably nothing, but I have noticed that when the browser opens various pages the circular pattern of dots that indicates it is loading runs incessantly. Any thoughts on this?

[fred.w....@gmail.com]

Ah! Not an Apple man myself but this is a different issue. 

Apple (and other tablet/phone vendors) try to "help" their customers by making their internet experience better. To do this they cache what they assume will be static parts of the web pages rather than going back to the server to reload them.

Thus to cure your iPad you need to get it to empty its caches.

There are instructions for this on the forum but I can not advise how to do it from my own experience.

Fred

[Arthur Good]

Thanks again, Fred! Just cleared the iPAD Safari cache, but got the same result. Instead of using the browser, I also tried using the Brennan App, but the App searched for the Brennan address, offered one up, but it did not allow me to connect with the App or UI. Would it be helpful to delete the App and re-load it?

[Ray Dion]

I also connect with an iPad. It exhibits similar behavior of not getting to the wifi connection or doing it very slowly. It occurs beyond using the B2. Real hassle because it does it on games and then I have to restart the app. My iPad is at least 3 years old, it is an iPad Pro (9.7 inch), model number MLMY2LL/A running IOS 15.3.1. Unclear to me if it the IOS, the wifi chips or just old age (like me).

Ray

[fred.w....@gmail.com]

Hmm!

I do know that there are Apple users on the Forum that have said how to clear things, I think it is more than the Safari cache!

Could I suggest you try actually powering off the device entirely then rebooting I think that may sort it. Please tell me if it does.

Fred

[Arthur Good]

I actually tried rebooting the iPAD as well with the same result. If I launch the Brennan App, it cannot locate the B2 and offers  a manual connection for which I tried previous IP addresses to no avail. My iPad Air is vintage mid-2020. Maybe Ray has a point about progressive age. Just like me. On the plus side, the Android App on my Samsung Galaxy S21 works perfectly.

[fred.w....@gmail.com]

Remember I an NOT an Apple expert, But this procedure may be worth a try (read it to the end first)

Fred

[JFBUK]

Hi,

this may seem obvious but are you sure your your iPad and B2 are connected to the same network subnet ?

i.e. do the IP addresses both start the same way e.g. 192.168.0.nn ?

John

[Arthur Good]

Lo and behold! Resetting the Network on my iPAD was successful! The result came from launching the Brennan App and having it scan for the Brennan address. The result started with a 174.xxx address, which connected when I tapped it. 

Many thanks to Fred, John, and others who have been extremely helpful. As a bonus, the onboard Safari browser seems to be more responsive. 

[fred.w....@gmail.com]

😁

[Ray Dion]

BTW I also reset my networks on my iPad. Decided at 2AM not to put in all of my SSIDs (4 SSIDs over two subnets) and just chose to use my private 5G network. It appears after only a few hours of play that my games are playing better. My B2 is on the same subnet but uses the 2.4G SSID. It also connects to all my wired ports. The other subnet is for freeloading :-) friends when they come over. It does not connect to my private subnet.

So your answer has me a bit concerned and I hope it is a typo. The 192.168.X.X address that people refer to above (of which 192.168.1.X is part of) is what is called a non-routable IP address. That means any network can use them but unless you have Network Address Translation in your router, none of those machines will be seen by the internet because the router will not forward those address. All routers run NAT because you need connection to the Internet. They just use your outward facing IP assigned by your provider for all traffic on your local subnet.

The addresses that are formally approved as non-routable are:

RFC 1918 name, IP address range, Number of addresses, Largest CIDR block (subnet mask), Host ID size, Mask bits, Classful description[Note 1]

24-bit block, 10.0.0.0 – 10.255.255.255, 16777216, 10.0.0.0/8 (255.0.0.0), 24 bits, 8 bits, single class A network

20-bit block, 172.16.0.0 – 172.31.255.255, 1048576, 172.16.0.0/12 (255.240.0.0), 20 bits, 12 bits, 16 contiguous class B networks

16-bit block, 192.168.0.0 – 192.168.255.255, 65536, 192.168.0.0/16 (255.255.0.0), 16 bits, 16 bits, 256 contiguous class C networks

In practice, it is common to subdivide these ranges into smaller subnets, that is what the class A, B, and C networks imply.

Your address starts with 174. This means there is a small probability that you will want to connect to a machine that is on the Internet that has an address that starts with 174 and you will not be able to connect to it.

Sorry Delete/new post due to dyslexic typo.

[fred.w....@gmail.com]

Hmm!

I think that the point is that behind the House Routers NAT function it is possible to set up any xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx range provided the first three 

xxx.xxx.xxx s are static in your house. My netgear router certainly allows you to do this and maybe some router vendors 'default' to using address spaces other than 192.168  

I am no networking guru but that is my understanding of the inside universe of a NAT DHCP servics.

Fred

[Ray Dion]

A bit off topic.

You are essentially correct. This is a little more detail of why and you have more flexibility. 

Think of an IP address as a network number followed by a computer number. The NetMask tells you which is which.

Looking at my Netgear R6700 router there are two fields that control this. 

IP address. This is the IP address of the router. It contains your network number and a computer number.

NetMask - This tells the router how many bits are in the network number. If the bit is set to one then that is part of the fixed portion of the IP address or network number. If it is a zero then it can be chosen by your DHCP to differentiate your computers (computer number).  You have flexibility to create a lot of really small subnets or fewer but much larger subnets. It all depends on your netmask.

DHCP assigns your computer number.

The netmask for a typical default setting for a home router (that nobody changes generally) is 255.255.255.0. A 255 represents all one's in an eight bit number (1+2+4+8+16+32+64+128=255). So if you have three 255's then those numbers are fixed. In the standard I quoted above it says 256 Class C addresses. This means you set the third octet to a number from 0 to 255 and your entire subnet uses that number. This is your network number. You can chose 255 addresses (computer number). I think 255 is used as a special broadcast event and zero may also be reserved, so it might be 254 computers on one subnet with 256 addresses.

If you change the NetMask to 255.255.0.0, you can still use 192.168.X.X instead of always keeping the third octet the same. This means you have one network of 2^16 (65536) computers.  Generally businesses will manage many small groups of computers with multiple routers for reliability. If one router goes down, it effects a smaller number of customers/employees. Home users (our target audience) deal better with just fixing the three octets since most homes will not have more than 200 IP addresses. That could change with the Internet of Things.

Those are typical values most easily understood for home use. What if I were to set the router at IP address 192.168.1.129 and the NetMask at 255.255.255.128? Then I would have IP on the computers from 192.168.1.130 to 192.168.1.255 because the most significant bit in the 4 octet must always be a one in this example. If I made the router is 192.168.1.1 and the computer addresses are 192.168.1.2 to 192.168.1.127. The 192.168.1.127 address would be the broadcast address like the 255 was above. As soon as the last octet exceeded 127 then the network number would change and I would not find it, need another router!

I'll just repeat the risks of changing the numbers if you are not careful. If you chose numbers that are valid routable addresses then you could create a situation where two machines on the internet have the same IP address. Since yours will be NAT'ed yours is hidden from the rest of the world. Everybody else will go to the real site, nobody knows you exist. But if you try to go out to that website/ip address your router will say, "That address is on my internal network so I won't send it out to the internet". You cannot talk to those IP addresses. Hence you want to use one of those address groups I mentioned because NOBODY uses those as their internet address or you MIGHT (low probability) not be able to connect to what you want to. 

[fred.w....@gmail.com]

Just to illustrate what I said above

As you can see I could choose any IP address range to be used on the inside (LAN side) of my Router, It is the WAN, Internet and ISP that determine what my House's outward facing IP number is (This has of cause to conform to the rules of IP allocation in the big wide world web).

Fred

[fred.w....@gmail.com]

Hi Ray,

You are of cause correct and I take your point here:-

" I'll just repeat the risks of changing the numbers if you are not careful. If you chose numbers that are valid routable addresses then you could create a situation where two machines on the internet have the same IP address. Since yours will be NAT'ed yours is hidden from the rest of the world. Everybody else will go to the real site, nobody knows you exist. But if you try to go out to that website/ip address your router will say, "That address is on my internal network so I won't send it out to the internet". You cannot talk to those IP addresses. Hence you want to use one of those address groups I mentioned because NOBODY uses those as their internet address or you MIGHT (low probability) not be able to connect to what you want to. "

Thinking about it I don't think I can recall typing a WAN IP number address to get to anything outside my router. I think most users would rely on the DNS system's friendly names and leave it to the web spiders to get them to the correct IP for that name. However having said that I may have "Pinged" one or two things now and again.

Fred