I thought moving to Fibaro ID meant remote access was possible?

[cjard 1]

I have a typical home network - DHCP/wireless, HCLite and some dimmers. It's mobile broadband so the IP probably changes every now and then if the connection redials

 

I've set the fibaro app ona  few iphones/ipads in the house and all works well inside. I had to register a fibaro ID for some, though others (where the fibaro app was installed before the forced update to fibaro ID) would proceed without it for a while, but even they have now forced me to use fibaro ID

 

Not that I mind; I thought it was beneficial...

 

But the other day I left the house, out of wifi range, but I could still see that the top room light was on. No problem, I thought.. I'll just get myiphone out...

 

..and it refused to connect to the home centre..

 

In all the apps, the home centre has a local ip (192.168...) so relatively meaningless when I'm out in the world, on 3G cellular coverage, but I genuinely thought that as part of the "fibaro ID gives you remote access" news the home centre would get around this in some way, either by establishing a permanent outbound TCP connection to fibaro down which events could then be passed, or maybe using UPnP to set up a port forward automatically, some naïve regular polling (ugh), or some other NAT traversal technique..

 

But I didn't find any indication that it's done so.. So what benefit did fibaro ID give me, that I couldn't have arranged myself with a manual port forwarding and a no-ip style dynamic DNS? Is something broken about my particular setup that stops me accessing remotely the HCL?

Edited January 31, 2017 by cjard

[Guest FredrikKarlsson]

5 minutes ago, cjard said:

I have a typical home network - DHCP/wireless, HCLite and some dimmers. It's mobile broadband so the IP probably changes every now and then if the connection redials

In all the apps, the home centre has a local ip (192.168...) so relatively meaningless when I'm out in the world, on 3G cellular coverage, but I genuinely thought that as part of the "fibaro ID gives you remote access" news the home centre would get around this in some way, either by establishing a permanent outbound TCP connection to fibaro down which events could then be passed, or maybe using UPnP to set up a port forward automatically, some naïve regular polling (ugh), or some other NAT traversal technique..

 

 

What is probably happening is that you have DHCP IP assignment, and the HCL cannot access the router. Or, you use the 192.168.x.x. range of IPs in your DHCP server, but it got a new one when you booted your HCL. This will be a problem for all computers inside your network that needs to be accessed directly, and the HCL is no different.

Actually, I prefer there not being a direct tunnel to the Fibaro remote access service via a server on the HCL. Simple access via IP is not safe, but a bit less obviously unsafe, I think.

 

Anyway, you need a DHCP IP reservation for your HCL. Go into your router and connect the HCL MAC address with a specific IP on your subnet (preferable not taken just at the moment). Then make sure that the setup is active (possibly restart router) and restart your HCL. If the HCL gets the new IP, then you should be good to go forever (or at least for a long time). You need to update the IP accessed in the apps too of course to the new IP.

 

And if it doesn't work - please make sure that you have remote access enabled in your HCL.