Iotawatt.local suddenly stopped working

nothing has changed in my network or computer. power cycling iotawatt did not help… was working fine for 6 months, failed in the last few days / week(s). i assume not daylight savings time related?

this is what is shown in the browser:

This page isn’t working

iotawatt.local didn’t send any data.

ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE

thanks
Keith

It is most likely a problem with a router assigned IP address changing, but let’s take it from the top. What is the status of the LED.

https://docs.iotawatt.com/en/master/troubleshooting.html

i restarted my network. the status light on iotawatt is a pulsing green.

iotawatt is connected to one of my access points and i can see some traffic. my access points are named the same, so it is possible for it to connect to another one, but this one is most likely cause it’s closest. i can ping iotawatt. no telnet available with the devi(failed to connect)? why would it matter if the ip changed, i’m hitting it by hostname “iotawatt” and can ping it from the hostname too.

i have iotawatt configured to update on stable releases. has there been an update recently? different url to access (i am using “iotawatt.local”) ? i’m launching chrome with the debugger and no caching. i don’t see anything interesting. same issue with IE.

thanks!
Keith

So when you ping it, you get the IP address. Have you tried going to HTTP://ip address?

When it was working, your computer had discovered the IP address of the iotawatt using a protocol called mDNS, which is a datagram protocol where your computer sends out a broadcast on the lan asking if anybody answers to the name iotawatt. The IoTaWatt has a listener that hears it’s name and sends your computer a response saying “I’m iotawatt and my IP is …”. Your computer tucks that IP address away and uses it for all subsequent communications with IoTaWatt.local.

If the IoTaWatt gets a new IP address, unbeknownst to your computer, it can continue to try to access the IoTaWatt using the old IP. It will be trying to talk to it on port 80. If some other device is assigned the old IP, then when you ping, you will actually be pinging the proud new owner of the IP, who is pleased as punch that someone noticed it and happily responds to the ping. Typically, that new IP owner is a client and not a server and so will ignore the port 80 requests.

If you can see the IoTaWatt in your router client list, then try to access it using the IP address you find there (usually works best with http:// prepended).

assume all url’s below are prepended with “http://”, i can’t reply with more than two links cause i am a new user (it get’s rejected)

it’s working now when i use the url “iotawatt” vs “iotawatt.local” any reason the url changed? i can’t think of anything that i did that would cause it to change. Firmware version: 02_05_02

ping does correctly resolve the ip address of “iowatt” to the correct address, ping does not resolve the ip address of “iowatt.local”. maybe “iowatt.local” is/was a vhost?

i should have mentioned that i did try “192.168.l.211” and “192.168.l.211:80” with no luck. i get a site can’t be reached, instead of this page is not working. it’s not even working now. not sure why the ip address isn’t working when the hostname is.

thanks for the help!
Keith

Don’t know if this is a typo or what you are trying to tell me but you seem to use both iowatt and iotawatt in the post above. Are you saying that the unit responds to

http://iowatt

and not

http://iowatt.local

or

http://iotawatt.local

sorry, that was a typo. i am using iotawatt everywhere, no iowatt anywhere.

iotawatt works iotawatt.local doesn’t. iotawatt.local used to work and was the only way i accessed it

thanks
Keith

Can you look in the message log and see what IP the IoTaWatt is reporting in the connected message?

3/13/20 22:56:03 WiFi connected. SSID=xxx, IP=192.168.1.211, channel=3, RSSI -66db

actually, the site does come up now by ip address too. it looks like i have a lowercase “L” in the ip address in my earlier posts, no idea how it got there though, but that must have been why it wasn’t working. i was rushing, and i was trying to append “.local” to the ipAddress initially, so probably related to that.

so, the question still is: why does iotawatt.local no longer work? doesn’t really matter if we figure it out, but it is weird that the url suddenly changed.

also seeing a bunch heap memory has degraded messages in the logs. maybe from EmonService, which i didn’t end up using, so i just shut it off. hopefully this will resolve those periodic errors and restarts

3/12/20 19:37:21 EmonService: Start posting at 03/12/20 14:49:00
3/12/20 19:37:31 Updater: Invalid response from server. HTTPcode: -11
3/12/20 19:38:31 Heap memory has degraded below safe minimum, restarting.

thanks!
Keith

That’s caused by WiFi issues. It should go away when 02_05_05 catches up with you.

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