Arlo Pro3 VMB4540 Library Unavailable

[Otter69]

For the past several days my library is unavailable. The library is stored on an external hard drive and worked properly for several months. The unit has been in operation since 11/2020 in it's current configuration. I had previously had a similar issue in July 2021. To fix the issue in July I uninstalled the App and re-installed the App 3.5.3 from then on it worked fine until several days ago. Now I receive the following note when trying to access my library, "There was an error obtaining your library. Arlo team is working on this issue." And then it has a box highlighted with the phrase "Try again." I have not made any changes to my settings, typical Arlo... it just stops working properly for no known reason. I did re-install the app again but the error message is the same.

[jguerdat]

It may be an issue with the hard drive. Remove it and try a thumb drive of 16GB or greater to see if that works.

[Otter69]

Without doing anything, the library for this smarthub is now showing available on my app. The system is great when it works properly. But it does try your patience since it just quits without any reason and starts again several days later. This has become a more common accurence over the past 2 months.

[LukevdWaal]

So I’m having a similar issue. Bought the 2 piece set of Arlo Pro 3 cameras with the SmartHub. Installing it was easy peasy, have a video doorbell already so I just added the new pieces to the app.

At first everything was working fine, but since this morning I cannot access the video recordings on the SmartHub. There’s a Kingston USB drive (16 GB) plugged into it, and I could download and view the recordings on it until now but as soon as I select the Base Station in the drop down menu it just keeps trying to load the recordings but isn’t showing anything. Also, I turned on Port Forwarding to be able to view the recordings when I’m out, but when I try to look at the status I get told “cannot connect to router. Check settings etc etc”.

So I contacted Grain customer support (they’re absolutely amazing by the way, would recommend them to anyone!) and they checked the settings, but all seems ok with the router settings.

This is what Grain said the router is now set to (and what means it should work according to them):

This is directly from the configuration on the router; 

router nat portforward 3 enable

router nat portforward 3 name portForward3

router nat portforward 3 extip 0.0.0.0

router nat portforward 3 extport 18751

router nat portforward 3 intip 192.168.1.123

router nat portforward 3 intport 18751

router nat portforward 3 protocol both

Can anyone help out with this issue? Cheers.

[StephenB]

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@LukevdWaal wrote:

So I contacted Grain customer support

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Who is Grain support, and what is their relationship with Arlo???

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@LukevdWaal wrote:

router nat portforward 3 extport 18751

router nat portforward 3 intip 192.168.1.123

router nat portforward 3 intport 18751

router nat portforward 3 protocol both

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• Is 18751 the port that the app says you need to forward?
• Is 192.168.1.123 your base station's local IP address?  Note this can change when you power-cycle the base or the router.  So you might also need to reserve that IP address in the router settings.

Also, are you having this problem when your phone is connected to your home wifi?  Or only when you are away from home?

[LukevdWaal]

Sorry, I should've explained this a bit better. Been spending a bit too much time on it.

So Grain is my broadband provider so they can remotely access the router to change settings if needed. 

The app doesn't tell me anything about which port it needs or if it needs a certain IP address. I turned on Port Forwarding and this is what it came up with. 

I just spent over an hour chatting to Arlo support, now need to upload some files to them so the engineers can have a better look. 

The problem is the same at home or away from home. It is also the same on all my devices. Iphone, Ipad, Windows laptop.

Cheers.

[StephenB]

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@LukevdWaal wrote:

The app doesn't tell me ...  if it needs a certain IP address.

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Your router is forwarding the port to a specific IP address (the one in the config you posted).  That has to be the base's IP address, otherwise it won't work.  The address is allocated by your router, not the Arlo system.

One problem with forwarding ports generally is that the router doesn't always allocate the same IP addresses.  You can usually force that behavior by using a router feature called address reservation.  I'd contact Grain again, and ask them if they reserved the address.  Otherwise, if you reboot the router or the base station, port forwarding might go to the wrong device (not the base).

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@LukevdWaal wrote:

The app doesn't tell me anything about which port it needs ... I turned on Port Forwarding and this is what it came up with. 

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The two sentences above are contradictory.  The app does tell you what port needs to be forwarded when you enable forwarding.  I am thinking you are telling me that 18751 is the port it gave you (and that it also gave you 192.168.1.123 as the IP address). 

The port is under Arlo's control. But as I've said above, the IP address is not (and can change w/o notice).  So the IP address should be reserved.

[LukevdWaal]

Ah ok, you just made this a lot clearer to me. Grain did say that static IP addresses (which I'm guessing is what you're referring to)  isn't something they can do at the moment. I'll have to get back to them and ask why not.

[sacrao]

I have a similar issue, no recordings on local storage.

[Otter69]

And here we go again... same problem. Uninstalled the app, reinstalled and I still have this error. This has become too common of an issue.

This is getting old