Well, progress of sorts. I did find a faulty component in my setup. I connect to the Farmbot via Ethernet which runs to a WiFi bridge device which is a point-to-point device. FWIW, the device is an Engenius Network Enstation and for this type of application its awesome and not too expensive.
Well, part of the curse - its not just connectivity - its everything. Because I didn’t get to winterize my Farmbot last year, the boards at the top which connect to the rails bowed out. With a dedicated son, a steaming device, a hammer, wood block, clamps, decking screws, spiral shank nails, we managed to
- Get the rails straight enough
- Put brackets in place so we should be good going forward, especially if we winterize
- Inadvertently we probably steam cleaned the Engenius Enstation
So I replaced the Enstation yesterday as I had a spare (the kit included two). The thing is that with rebooting and doing my network tests, it wasn’t quite conclusive. I got connectivity for only a minute.
But I woke up this morning and everything was green. So, something took a while to fix itself. The firewall I have is enterprise grade and and if a site was in some way non-compliant, that site might have been blocked for minutes or days.
So things are working now. I was occasionally getting a message that I’m disconnected from the message broker but that seems to happen only when changing browser taps. When I’m using the app, all seems fine!
Further more, after replacing this point-to-point device (which ultimately failed completely), I’ve been able to remove all the special firewall rules I was playing with. After rebooting, all comes up and connects. So, it seems this device was the problem. But, there is still one more variable that I haven’t reverted. I put my farmbot and my laptop on a separate network segment. So, later I’ll figure out if that had any impact.
Thanks again for the help!