In my past few months of running Vera, and after some initial problems with communication and a replacement she’s been kind to me. I’ve been running 15 or so devices, and several daily scenes, including 2 Schlage locks and the WD thermostat. Running .616 is stable, and I haven’t done the Luup yet at all. I’ve been happy, but I just can’t find enough hardware to automate any more effectively. (Hint…need Z-wave TRUE fan controls, speed and dimming, developed, just like proprietary Harbor Breeze, Hunter, etc., devices I can pick up at Lowes/Home Depot.)
However, I am forced to run Vera as my primary router, it was the only way she would behave. Routing, DHCP, everything flows from her and into several switches scattered about the house via Ethernet wiring. This is the essence of my problem…I can’t reposition it and use a different router, tried that already, it loses communications with the findvera service. It’s giving me limited options in troubleshooting.
This is the problem I’m having. In one room I need to upgrade the switch, and I’m replacing an old (pre 2005) 5 port 10/100 Linksys switch with some thing larger, more ports and Gigabit and to get rid of an array of wireless devices. As soon as I replace it, plug devices in, the entire network DHCP blows up. Every device drops and can no longer can connect to the outside or to each other. I’ve used THREE different brands of modern switches, D-Link, Netgear, and Linksys, all Gigabit capable, and when inserting them into the network, I’m seeing all devices in the network lose their IP address in favor of the self-assigned 169 addresses. As soon as I switch back the old 5 port, everything goes back to normal.
I’ve changed out copper back to that bedroom (100% basis), changed ports and switches. The only constant is that when I plug a new switch into that connection, it blows up. Sooner or later that switch is going to die.
Is there something in the Vera hardware which might not like the NUMBER of switches to be too high (The problem switch is #4)? Is here hardware in the modern switches which might be incompatible (However, I run most of my network on a string leaving this room and along the outer wall of the living room. The problem connection is on a 2nd string going the other direction – and it works with the much older 5 port hardware.) I was thinking IP conflict originally, but it works with the old hardware in place!!! So much for an IP conflict.
