SR203 firmware update 5.14.2249.R. broken communication between WiFi and wired devices

[LukePevo]

So 2 weeks ago my sky hub went offline at 7pm. When it came back on my mobile phone could not connect to my philips hue hub using the hue app. I initially thought it was a hue problem but when I enabled out of home mode I could connect to the hub using mobile data! My hue was plugged into a netgear switch...I have 4 in my house. I connected hue directly to the sky hub and it started working again.  Then I noticed that my laptops on WiFi had connection issues with my printer hard wired to another switch upstairs. Thinking it was the printer playing up I tried connecting to its Web interface via my pc hardwired to same switch as the printer and it worked. However the Web interface would not load on the laptops! I then thought I would check my sky hub and noticed it had the sip alg option I had heard about so now I worked out that the reason the sky hub went offline was because sky pushed out a firmware update. Which I have now verified....its version 5.14.2249.R. 

Since after an update its recommended to power cycle all devices. I went and did just that and powered down all my sky boxes , my hub and my switches. Turned the hub back on followed by the switches in order they are connected then sky then my devices. Hey presto the communication issues between devices on WiFi and hardwired devices on my netgear switches was resolved. 

Except the issue came back 2 days later!!!

It's clear that this firmware update to fix dhcp and voip timing bugs has now introduced a new bug!

Sky sort this out please! Can we downgrade to the previous firmware in the mean time? I didn't have dhcp issues and don't have a VOIP phone so I do not need this buggy firmware which has broken my hard wired network!

I spent a lot of money and time and effort to run cat6 from my router to a distribution switch in the loft which has multiple uplinks that feed down to switches in every room and now your firmware update has broken communication between WiFi and hardwired devices on 3rs party switches! As a side note my sky q main box and 2 mini boxes are all hardwired and all 3 have WiFi AP disabled so only my sky hub provides the Wifi

[Chrisee]

@LukePevo not seen this type of fault reported on this firmware release so it is not a known issue as far as I am aware. A factory reset of the hub may sort the issue which can be done either from the hub's interface or by pressing and holding the reset pin until,the power led flahes which takes up to 20 seconds but that will clear any changes to the default settings you may  have made.

What type of switches do you have are they managed or unmanaged? Issues with managed switches are often down to configuration issues on the switches but it is not unusual for Sky hubs to have issues in complex set ups as they are designed for simple domestic networks. If you do require more complex set up you may need a third party router that supports your needs.

However issues with simple unmanaged switches should not happen. I have 2 myself on a system that is running the same firmware. Couple of points it is not at all clear why you have disabled the wifi on your Q boxes as all you have done is remove their wifi hotspots which reduces wifi speed. The Q system produces a mesh wifi network with each box and hub acting as a node which cannot interfere with each other and with fast ethernet backhaul  all will give fast wifi.

Second point are all of the devices listed as connected on the hub and can you ping the printer from the PC simply checking for IP addressing issues?

Having issue with printer network interfaces is not uncommon so check you are running the latest version and run through the manufacturers fault lists  - I have spent many happy hours debugging printers especially from HP. 

Sky can't roll back the firmware unfortunately but they will read your post. There is a another firmware update due shortly so leave you hub powered overnight as an update at 7pm indicates your hub missed the scheduled overnight update, 

[LukePevo]

Hi Chrisee, thank you for your detailed response

I have netgear switches, the hub has an uplink to a managed netgear switch in the loft. This feeds down to a managed switch in the office (where printer and PC is connected) and 2 unmanaged switches in other rooms one being the living room (where philips hue was connected but had to be moved direct to hub). The managed switches are not doing anything fancy, just default settings. I only got them really because they can do line tests so I could verify my cabling throughout internal walls was not damaged during installation.

So I disabled my WiFi hostpots for 2 reasons. One was the WiFi speed was not as fast as connected to the main hub. The Hub was in the living room next to my SKY Q box and the mini boxes in bedroom and kitchen and as they were all within close vicinity to each other my mobile phone could connect to different access points. As I work from home and use Jabber for company calls when it switched access point it could cause my calls to disconnect. Also if I was connected to the mini box and I went outside in the garden I would loose connection and it would connect to the mini box behind my kitchen TV and the connection was not great. I since moved the hub to a central location in my house under my stairs in a cupboard and turned off the APs on all 3 sky boxes. Now I have done this the hubs WiFi reaches the whole house and to the bottom of my garden without needing multiple SSIDs causing issues when switching between them. I also had issues occasionly with the Sky Q mesh so hard wired my Sky boxes with Cat6 and Gigabit switches. So I know your saying its the switches fault but it worked flawlessly until the firmware update.

All my devices show connected on my hub and all are pingable including my philips hue and printer but accessing the hub hub via the app and the web interface of my printer does not work from any device on WiFi now. I have tested with 3 laptops and 3 mobile phones on on WiFi, as soon as I plug the laptops into ethernet they can get to the printers web interface. Or if I plug hue direct into the sky hub it works on WiFi.

So this is 100% a communication issue between devices on WiFi talking to devices hard wired to a switch connected to the Sky Hub. Not all traffic is being blocked through, ping works and although my printer says offline on the laptops, once I run the troubleshooter it reconnects and can print but not access the web interface.

My printer is a HP laserjet and hard wired, I've only seen issues in the past with printers that are conencted via WiFi. I am a senior network engineer with 12 years experience at a global bank dealing with all kinds of networks and switches and routers and also worked with printers. So I can safely say this is an issue introduced by the Sky firmware update. There are lots of reports of SKY hubs causing issues with BT mesh discs and ubiquti equipment. Also talks of Sky Q causing spanning tree issues.

0 Links

[Chrisee]

@LukePevo as I said I have not seen similar issues from other users not that the firmware is not causing your issue. As there are several million of these hubs in use if there is a firmware bug we see numerous reports. The DHCP and VOIP issues are examples of previous bugs which had numerous posts and were fixed. Perhaps others will report similar issues butvtondate you are alone.

There have been reports of issues with managed hubs since the Sky mesh system was introduced in 2016 and in previous discussions with Sky they have pointed out that their hubs are not designed for use in complex networks. Sky decline to document their systems as they say they are designed for domestic use which make it difficult to have any certainty on the cause of issues.

I repeat the suggestion that your network probably needs a better specified router.

.Mesh wifi nodes all transmit the same duaalband SSID and devices can roam seamlessly between nodes which is why I questioned your decision. Far be it from me though to question your knowledge as clearly you seem to know more than I do. 

I hope you find a solution. 

[simon194]

I've had probems with this firmware accessing wired devices from wireless devices. For example the web interfaces for my VoIP phone and AVR are completely inaccessible from a wireless device.

I've got round the problem by setting up a separate access point connected to the hub and using that to connect wireless devices to. It's not ideal because I don't get full wifi access around the house but all my wired devices are now accessible.

[TimmyBGood]

---

@LukePevo wrote:

The managed switches are not doing anything fancy, just default settings.

---

Default settings can still be doing things ; )

[TomThumb5ive]

This forum has seen quite a few posts about how the 5.14.2249.R firmware & seemingly random consequences now being faced by a small number of sky subscribers, 

The good news is sky have pushed out a revised firmware fairly quickly, but without a change log & a staggered rollout, it's to early to speculate if all recently introduced anomalies will disappear with the introduction of the new 5.14.2260.R firmware.

Tom...

[LukePevo]

Unfortunately not...my sky hub has now been updated again to 5.14.2260.R. I did a factory reset after this but still not fixed the communication issues between WiFi and wired devices.

Infact it has made things worse as now my 2 managed switches are not showing under attached devices, I cannot get to their webinterface and I cannot ping them although my wired devices on the switches work. If I reboot my switches they briefly become pingable and show in attached devices for a few minutes then dissappear again. 

[LukePevo]

OK so after much troubleshooting I have think I have found the cause of the problem

As per the diagram below, I have a SKy Q mini in the bedroom bridged to the office switch via powerline adapaters. As soon as I connect the ethernet from the Sky Q mini to the powerline I cannot reach my Hue bridge or Sono via the apps on my mobile connected via WiFi, nor can I get to the web interface of my printer via a web browser on my mobile or and WiFi connected laptops. As soon as I unplug the SKy Q mini connectivity is restored. To prove it was the powerline adapater I connected a long ethernet cable from the Sky Mini directly to the office switch and the issue does not happen.

So although the issue is caused by the powerline adapater, this has been working for 6 months and only started causing issues with the latest Sky SR203 firmware update.

I was thinking of running wireshark to see if I can see what is acvtually going on here but it definately looks like its to do with the way the SKY Q boxes talk to each other generating some traffic is not playing nicely with the powerline adapaters.

[JPR007]

@LukePevo I hate to say this, and it looks like you've tracked down your problem anyway, but Sky equipment, in particular Sky Q boxes usually do not play well with managed switches for some reason. Not quite sure why but I have seen various posts. 🤔

One of my mini boxes is connected to an unmanaged switch via Powerline adapters, my router is running the latest .2260 firmware, never experienced any issues, even on previous firmware. That is the only device using powerlines though everything else is either direct Ethernet or via the switch. 

[Mad+Sweeney]

@LukePevo 

As a follow up, I think the lower level reason in your case was because the TPLINK AV600 does not seem to forward tagged packets as others have mentioned in the past - See

https://community.tp-link.com/en/home/forum/topic/105744

I think that Sky Q devices expect wired ethernet links to be able to work as trunk links and some switches or media convertors which can't forward tagged VLAN frames (802.1q) will interfer with things. Non tagged frames can pass through fine, so doing tests yourself between a computer either end will make the link look usable.

I think that when Sky Q first launched it didn't do this and would consider wired ethernet links as non trunk. Most of the special sauce of Sky Q was around wifi and its own powerline which later got dropped. I think for whatever reason Sky Q now wants to be able to have different VLANs working over single wired links (trunking) and this will break existing installations that have old devices unable to forward 802.1q ethernet frames.

[Mad+Sweeney]

I think the most common way of expressing what the AV600 devices should be able to do but can't would be:

"802.1q pass-through"

Sometimes the wrong terms are used. For example, in this Amazon review for example somebody explained that the AV600 does not support tagging (nobody would expect them to actively tag anything) but what the reviewer means is that that AV600 does not support tag pass-through.

https://www.amazon.com/review/R3T1PW1CKTJ83Y/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00LEFYTMK

In that person's testing rather than the packets getting lost they suggest that the tags were removed which sounds very wrong.

Often people will say that all switches / converters will just forward ethernet frames as that is their job and don't understand that devices can do things wrong and be mass produced and sold for years and only when new equipment or software in other equipment is changed does their buggy nature come to light.

Your diagram was excelent BTW and I forgot to mention that.

If lack of 802.1q pass-through turns out to be the issue (e.g I'm not talking out of somewhere other than my mouth) then perhaps there should be a list of known compatible and incompatible switches and media convertors somewhere on Sky's site as I don't think either type of these device are specialist things nowadays.

[Chrisee]

@Mad+Sweeney Sky have a policy of not supporting third party kit either positively by saying that unit A will work or negatively by listing kit that won't so the chance they would post ever post a list as you suggest is vanishing unlikely. 

This is complicated as some of the vagaries of Sky Q's networking are connected to security features Sky do not document for pretty obvious reasons. The official response is normally along the lines  "Sky Q was designed to work on simple domestic networks" which is why, as a routine, forum regulars always recommend the simplest unmanaged switches etc as past experience has shown the more complex the network the higher the likelihood it wont work. 

In the past some knowledgable people have tried to dig deeper but strangely when they post what they have discovered in Sky's own forum the posts seem to disappear. 😉

[Mad+Sweeney]

@Chrisee 

Yes. I understand that efforts to maintain compatability lists is hard especially given revisions of 3rd party devices and their own firmware changes on top of changes to the customer premesis equiptment that Sky provides.

When the TV equipment I have oriiginally arrived there were even plastic caps blocking the ethernet jacks of at least the mini boxes, I can't remember if the main box had one. That is certainly a way of saying 'Not supported'.

Indeed in this case the extra equipment was indeed put in between set top boxes, so one could argue that this link is Sky's territory, so I have some sympathy with Sky's position.

If for example the Sky Q Hub itself had come with plastic caps on its ethernet ports that would appear like a clobbered offering though as it would have been Sky saying that I can't plug in computers or anything and that I must only use my own devices via Wifi.  Obvisouly that would not sell as and offering.

However the combination of a TV delivery system plus a broadband delivery system where an element of the later can be provided by the former makes the system whole.  It is a difficult concept for a consumer to understand that they can plugs things in here (the hub) but not there (the set top boxes).

Consumers will also when they have issues want to fix things themselves. If things like wireless signals are weak between set top boxes, they will try twisted pair or what they believe to be equivalents of that using consumer briding devices whether they be switches, media convertors, mesh Wifi satelites pluged into the back of a set top box are these are sold everywhere.  Morre importantly these devices are sold in places where consumers buy things (like Amazon) and marketed to consumers.

Sky, supporting people who have bought enterprise gear or prosumer stuff like Ubiquity would obviously be a step too far.

Regarding recent changes I've seen in behavior though not been able to prove without experimentation, I can guess why such a change might have been made and indeed security would be one of them. I've been careful not to say that devices are doing X and I bet the reason is Y 😉

My goal here was to add credence to the Sky Q eco system (which I think is excellent) by trying to explain what can be broken in 3P equipment which shows that Sky are not deliberately trying to make things not work, more that it is impossible to do so with every wired ethernet combo.

Ironically, given the amount of ethernet equipment on the market with RJ45 ports on it, air/radio is a better choice of medium in some respects for a consumer premises because people cannot mess with it so much other than building walls or putting devices into cabinets etc.  Figuring this out was the original genius of Sky Q.  Obviouslly wireing homes with what is treated as proprietary cable is what the other guys do.

[Chrisee]

@Mad+Sweeney some of what you say makes sense and some things Sky do really annoy me.

I will give an example Sky Q uses wifi to connect and is flaky as we all know one work round that works in practice are Powerline adapters which I use myself but Sky tell their staff not to recommend them as a solution as they cannot guarantee as it may cause issues in some homes. This sometimes comes out as "Sky saysPowerline wont work with Q".

There are other examples but having been one of the Oracle group for 4 years I have had opportunities to meet some of the people who make these decisions and have been unable to get them to change. Sky view their hub and TV boxes as  "black boxes" which the customer does not need to understand and should just follow the pretty colour coded instructions. They specifically do not want to encourage people to use other kit and do the minimum required of them in this regard. They have said if that policy leads to them to lose customers either for the TV service or broadband so be it. 

The plugs over ethernet were on the v1 Q boxes dont think that applies now but Infollow what you say.