I’m on Android. I’ll try the hotspot thing shortly.
I enabled hotspot on my Android phone and the Rachio app never showed the network in the list of networks to configure.
I enabled hotspot on my Windows 10 laptop, forced to 2.4ghz mode, and the controller successfully connected to the laptop and showed in the connected devices list. It sat with the blinking third light for a while then fell back to a second blinking light, and is now showing the third blinking light again.
I assume this means that it failed to download the firmware update again.
Can I just RMA this thing and get a replacement unit with the right firmware in it?
I’ll talk to our success team tomorrow about your configuration. It’s really not the firmware but the inability to connect to internet. If they don’t have additional ideas I’ll work with them on next steps.
Can you try this for me?
Go into your phone’s settings and forget the wifi network that you are connecting the Rachio to, then run a wifi reset on the controller (up button and circle button until all lights around the circle are lit) and then try onboarding the controller.
If that doesn’t get you online, open up the help center of the app (click on the person button on the bottom of the main screen that says no controllers/add controller -> Help Center) then click run wifi scan (make sure you are still connected to the same wifi network you are trying to onboard and run the scan. Shoot us a ping when you’ve ran it and I will look into your scan results
Thanks
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Up button or down button? The app says down button to reset the wifi.
I did the following:
- Forgot all wireless networks on my phone
- Put my phone in airplane mode
- Connected my phone to the dedicated 2.4GHz network I have for the controller
- Ran the Rachio app
- Powered up the controller and held up and round button until all the lights blinked, even though the app says down and round button
- Finished the app steps to select the network and password
As with every other attempt the controller connected to the wifi network (I can see it in the list of connected devices), blinked the third light for a while, then went back to blinking the second light.
I did the wifi scan and sent a report. I put “neile” in the description of the issue.
@neile It looks like we were unable to make a connection to our servers. Please configure your firewall to allow inbound and outbound connections mqtt.rach.io … There are a few other DNS addresses in there as well, but I have a feeling that if you just allow this one, the other should work ok.
@neile I just wanted to add a bit more context for you on my last response. This is what your scan came back with
And it should look along the lines of this (This is a scan done from our ubiquity setup)
Please do not hard code those IP addresses, as they constantly change through AWS. Hope this gets you working. If you want to run another scan before you go through connecting I can help with reviewing.
Thanks!
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Aha! This isn’t a firewall problem, it’s a DNS problem.
My DNS config is as follows, and gets sent to clients when they obtain their IP address via DHCP:
192.168.1.81
8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4
The first one is a DNS server I run internally to provide name resolution for devices on my internal network. The other two are Google and handle everything else. My DNS server doesn’t forward on requests for domains it doesn’t know: it expects the clients to fall back to the other two name servers that were provided as part of DHCP.
All other clients on my home network correctly handle this. It appears the Rachio DNS client doesn’t do this, and simply gives up when it gets a “nope” response from my DNS server.
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I think it puts Rachio on my “not nice things” list, since every other network connected device I own can handle this properly 
Is there any known way to make the Rachio behave properly or am I going to have to change my DNS setup just for this one device?
According to our firmware team this is a limitation of the Gen 2 firmware.
Is there a way to exchange my Gen 2 for a Gen 3 since it doesn’t support this configuration?
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I’m surprised a bit that the others work. Normally a “no such domain” error is considered a valid DNS response and the client accepts that answer so there is no need to move on.
If you do a nslookup against your local DNS server what response do you get back since it has no forwarder setup?
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I can’t remember the exact wording, but it’s not “no such domain”, it’s something like “yeah, no, we’re not gonna give you one”. It’s probably a REFUSED response from looking at the list of common DNS response codes.
I’m not able to do the nslookup at the moment, but will try it later this week and report back with the actual response just for everyone’s entertainment.
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I would have expected a nxdomain response, it’s weird if it wasn’t that. Refused typically means an acl didn’t allow for the query
Honestly I would forward out of your name server since you have one. It provides you more control over bad actors on your network.
The response I get back via nslookup is “Query refused”.
Yes, I’ll be forwarding out of the name server and will see how that goes later today.
that sounds acl based.