Communication problem with emoncms

Hi,

My IotaWatt has been working a treat for many months and I’ve been very happy with it. Unfortunately, something happened a week ago that has stopped it communicating with emoncms.org and I don’t seem to be able to resolve the problem. The message log is as follows:

6/5/18 18:39:10 Real Time Clock is running. Unix time: 1528223950
6/5/18 18:39:10 Version: 02_02_30
6/5/18 18:39:10 Reset reason: Software/System restart
6/5/18 18:39:10 Trace: 14,11,90,12,13,14,11,90,12,13,14,11,90,12,13,14,11,90,12,13,14,11,90,84,86,88,12,13,14,13,102,103
6/5/18 18:39:10 ESP8266 ChipID:2222318
6/5/18 18:39:10 device name: IotaWatt, version: 3
6/5/18 18:39:10 Local time zone: 0
6/5/18 18:39:15 checkUpdate: Invalid response from server.
6/5/18 18:39:15 MDNS responder started
6/5/18 18:39:15 You can now connect to xxx IotaWatt.local
6/5/18 18:39:15 HTTP server started
6/5/18 18:39:15 dataLog: service started.
6/5/18 18:39:16 dataLog: Last log entry:1528223945
6/5/18 18:39:16 statService: started.
6/5/18 18:39:16 timeSync: service started.
6/5/18 18:39:16 WiFi connected. SSID: XXXXXX, IP: X.X.X.X
6/5/18 18:39:18 checkUpdate: Invalid response from server.
6/5/18 18:39:19 historyLog: service started.
6/5/18 18:39:19 historyLog: Last log entry:1528223940
6/5/18 18:39:25 EmonService: started.url: emoncms.org:80, node: IotaWatt, post interval: 5, encrypted POST
6/5/18 18:39:28 EmonService: input/get failed.
6/5/18 18:40:03 EmonService: input/get failed.
6/5/18 18:40:38 EmonService: input/get failed.
6/5/18 18:41:13 EmonService: input/get failed.
6/5/18 18:41:48 EmonService: input/get failed.
6/5/18 18:42:23 EmonService: input/get failed.
6/5/18 18:42:58 EmonService: input/get failed.
6/5/18 18:43:33 EmonService: input/get failed.
6/5/18 18:44:08 EmonService: input/get failed.
6/5/18 18:44:43 EmonService: input/get failed.

The things I’ve tried to so far are:

  • Hard reboot of the device
  • Several soft reboots of the device
  • Reboot of my router
  • Removing the emoncms id and restarting

I can see the device appears to be successfully logging data, as the data logs appear to be updating. My post interval is 5 secs and I’ve got bulk send set at 10. I’ve double checked my api key is correct.

Is there anything else I can try?

Many thanks for your help,

Tim

Your account may have been blocked because you sent too many requests, with a post interval of 5 seconds. You can probably only find out if this is the case by sending a request to Trystan e.g. via the openenergymonitor.org forum. emoncms.org only accepts updates of 10 seconds or more. Therefore, at least a post interval of 10 should be specified.

Many thanks for your response. I’ve created a second emoncms.org account to test it and reduced the post interval to 10 but unfortunately I’m still getting the same problem. It’s as if it can’t communicate with the server.

Update - I’ve just switched the webserver from emoncms .org to 80.243.190.58 and it’s started working, so it looks like there is name server problem going on. Is there a way I can checkout the networking? I don’t seem to be able to find a networking option in the menu now.

This is interesting: can you ping the website if you are in the same WLAN as the iotawatt?

Do you mean disconnecting and connecting to another WLAN? You can disconnect the current WLAN with the following command: http://Iotawatt.local/command?disconnect=yes

Found the problem - my router has been hacked! The default DNS server has been changed and therefore the device couldn’t see emoncms .org whereas some other devices on the same network could as they were on the correct DNS server.

Thanks for your help in getting to the bottom of this. Off to fix my router now.

1 Like

Glad you guys figured this out. As soon as I read the IP was working I thought DNS. If it was a hack, that would be the scenario for man-in-the-middle attacks to harvest account/password info. You might consider changing the pwds on important accounts where you don’t have two-factor authentication.