Arlo|Smart Home Security|Wireless HD Security Cameras
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lpoulsen
Aspirant
Aspirant

I bought an Arlo Pro 2 system. It came with VMB3500 base station.

Base station connects to camera and cloud (LEDs: Green Green Amber) but fails all attempts at discovery.

Support suggested maybe it was a defective unit, so I ordered a second, identical kit. Fails in exactly the same way.

 

How do I troubleshoot this?

 

I see the Windows-10 PC sending a SOAP request to 239.255.255.250 port 3702, but no response comes back. Is that the ARLO discovery message?

I have the windows firewall disabled.

The suggestions I am getting from Arlo's support team are not really useful.

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lpoulsen
Aspirant
Aspirant

I found a workaround, and the nature of it reveals something surprising about the design of the system.

I took the base station home with me. My home sits behind a NAT edge router. In this environment, the base station was able to pair with my mobile phone, and thus with my account, to which the mobile phone was logged in. This turned the 3rd LED green. Today, I took the base station back to my office, and the pairing was intact when I turned the base station back on.

 

This means that the pairing is NOT done by a local message exchange within the LAN. It appears that the pairing relies on the APP and the BASE both connecting to the cloud service and getting there with the same remote IP address. That is a bad design in my opinion. Furthermore, this assumption - that the camera system is behind a NAT gateway - is not documented, and is apparently not incrporated in the troubleshooting scripts available to the call center agents. I am not pleased.

 

Not I am hoping that someone at ARLO can explain how to perform the pairing without taking the base station home.

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jguerdat
Guru Guru
Guru

Are you using a VPN? If so, disable it for setup. ANy security settings you changed in the router, maybe MAC filtering, parental controls, etc.?

lpoulsen
Aspirant
Aspirant

I found a workaround, and the nature of it reveals something surprising about the design of the system.

I took the base station home with me. My home sits behind a NAT edge router. In this environment, the base station was able to pair with my mobile phone, and thus with my account, to which the mobile phone was logged in. This turned the 3rd LED green. Today, I took the base station back to my office, and the pairing was intact when I turned the base station back on.

 

This means that the pairing is NOT done by a local message exchange within the LAN. It appears that the pairing relies on the APP and the BASE both connecting to the cloud service and getting there with the same remote IP address. That is a bad design in my opinion. Furthermore, this assumption - that the camera system is behind a NAT gateway - is not documented, and is apparently not incrporated in the troubleshooting scripts available to the call center agents. I am not pleased.

 

Not I am hoping that someone at ARLO can explain how to perform the pairing without taking the base station home.

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