Camera going off-line one or two times every day.

[Cdrridg]

We have had our System for approximately one week. I have noticed that the camera goes off-line between one and two times every day. Resetting the base station does fix this however it gives us gaps in our coverage I only detect on motion and I only have the one camera. Any suggestions?

[TomMac]

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Cdrridg wrote:
We have had our System for approximately one week. I have noticed that the camera goes off-line between one and two times every day. Resetting the base station does fix this however it gives us gaps in our coverage I only detect on motion and I only have the one camera. Any suggestions?

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if it's only the camera going offline and not the base....

1) chk the cam led on front of base... if blinking, cam is at it's max range

2) interference possible... try temp putting the cam closer tothe base and see if it still goes off line on reg basis

[TheRealDeal]

my cameras starting doing this about 7-8 days ago. If you can move the cameras, move one right next to your base station and see if it continues to go offline for both. I have one camera for testing that is 1ft away from the base station and both my cameras go offline at the same exact time every few days. I encourage you to open a ticket with Arlo. The more of use that report the issue, the faster it will be fixed. BTW, what is your firmware version on the camera and base station?

[TheRealDeal]

Are anyone else's cameras going offline every day? I've shut down anything that would send a radio signal from anywhere near the base station and am still getting both cameras going offline about once a day. One camera is sitting 1 ft from the base station so I don't think it is interference.

[Rudy]

is it the camera going offline, or just the portal reporting the camera is offline?

also one foot from the base station is kinda close, and that in itself could cause interference.

once paired, the cameras should be a minimum of 6 feet from the base

[Cdrridg]

The solution I have come up with is to re-start the base station every morning. This prevents the cameras from going offline in-between resets and I end up with full coverage except when I choose to reset the base station. This is easily done from the application - so no need to actually be present at the base station.

[TheRealDeal]

I was rebooting in the morning for a few days also and it seemed to work but I figured the system should work as advertised so I let the cameras go offline in the hopes that arlo support would gain some useful logs to fix the issue. Too bad we couldn't write a script that would send a reboot request to the base station on a schedule until this issue gets resolved.

[jguerdat]

A simple timer would do this.  Some fancier ones (~$10-15) would let you set it for power off at one minute and back on one minute later - others are only 15 minute selections.

Still need to figure out why this is even necessary.  I don't have the problem but I do have a WiFi extender (also Netgear!) that has decided to cause problems after  a day of being on...

[TomMac]

Agreed... can't remember the last time my base dropped out or cams off line.

Since most have the newer s/w at this point something else is prob the cause... cable service, wifi , interference... alot of variables.

[TheRealDeal]

Cdrrigd, would it be possible for you to open a support case with arlo so the L2 engineers know that it is happened to others? I tried something different last night after all cameras went offline. The camera connectivity led on basestation was off. I opened and closed the camera battery door on one of the cameras and as soon as it stopped flashing blue, the led came back on and all cameras were online again. I also moved the camera that was 2 ft away to 8 ft away to eliminate it as a cause of interference.

[poweratom]

Yup. Same problem here. I just got mine yesterday. And they've gone offline three times in the past 24 hours. Really disappointing and frustrating.

[TheRealDeal]

Poweratom, please open a ticket with arlo on this issue so they can see that the issue is more widespread. My cameras have gone offline twice in the last 12 hours. You can open a ticket via email by clicking the "support" link at the top of the page then scroll down a bit until you see the submit via email part of the page. L2 engineers have had me trying various scenarios to rule out interferance and router. My cameras are still going offline. They used to work great until a couple weeks ago.

[poweratom]

Yup. Just submitted a ticket.

One thing I noticed was the cameras seem to go offline completely when there's a change of schedule going on (I have a schedule that turns off motion sensors in the backyard when the kids are around and usually hangout in the yard around that time). Anyone seeing this pattern? Maybe it was just a coincidence (happened 2x for me though).

[Rudy]

Just curious, how many modes do you have, I have problems when I have more than two modes

[poweratom]

I got 5 modes set up, including 2 that came as default modes with the base station ("all motion on" and "all motion off").

If you have a scheduler setup, a "Schedule" mode is automatically added and selected by default, which is what I have.

In the schedule mode, I mix/match the other 4 modes depending on time of the day (which is really just alters between which cameras have motion on/off).

Also, Netgear support replied to my ticket with a standard reply. The gist of it is basically:

* Put base station in DMZ or outside of firewall and see if it still happens

* Ensure ports 443 and 80 are open on the router

* Don't run the base station through proxy servers

These are pieces of advise are pretty much nonsense. If any of them were the problem, the base station and the cameras would not have worked in the first place, unlike the sporadic downtimes they are suffering.

As I'm typing this, my cameras are offline again. I'm pretty **bleep** close to shipping them back to Amazon for a refund. So much for my "scheduler" theory... The next scheduled rotation won't happen in another 4 hours.... And already the cameras are dead again. GAH!

[poweratom]

Oh, another thing the tech support asked me to do regarding the cameras not updating the firmware: He suggested that I place the camera beside the base station over night for the firmware update. This whole ordeal pretty much defeats the purpose of having the system installed at all.

I love the idea. I want to love the system. But with every little hiccup I encounter (and I have a full list of them; I'm holding off posting a review on Amazon because I want to use it for a while and give the systme a chance), I'm just that much closer to returning the system so that I don't have to spend any more time like a beta user would normally do.

[Rudy]

I have been having connectivity issues to the NetGear media server since the changes in May. I find if I have more than 2 modes (I only have day and night now) the issues gets real prevalent.

So I keep it at 2 modes per base station, and I have two base stations. I still can only stream at best 2 cameras per base station without having to make several attempts to get a stream. (connection timed out, unable to connect to media server, camera offline) NetGear says that 4 is the limit per base station. I run my cameras in "optimized" mode to lesson the load.

I have version FIOS and have a rock solid connection and service, which really never hiccuped the 4 years I have it come March. Its easy to blame the ISP but I know in my case the connection is fine because I don't have issues elsewhere and I have had these cameras since January 2015 and they actually worked great for 4 months.

I too love the product and love the concept and invested heavily in it, but there are issues on the back end which haven't been resolved for quite sometime now. And the issues are intermittent its only really noticed when you spend time using the app and keeping it open. I use the application on a PC.

[poweratom]

@Rudy, wow... Verizon FIOS. Lucky!

I'm on a fairly reliable Comcast cable connection here. Consistent 170Mpbs down/10Mpbs up. I've only noticed a couple of short outages in the 2 years I've signed up with the service. I work from home everyday and rely on the Internet heavily. Any network downtime or slowdown, I'd notice immediately. In all 5 cases where Arlo's system went down, Comcast's network was up. It wasn't the network.

I'm surprised at what you said that a simple mode change would screw up the entire camera network! I guess Netgear hasn't documented the "4 mode limit" anywhere either, huh? If so, they should just do a hard cap on the setup UI!! Given that their iOS app is just an embedded web app, they can do this on the serverside without even an app update. Also, in the scheduler, I've dialed down to only using 2 modes. But I have a feeling it's going to crap out at some point in the next 24 hours anyway (the first 3 times it crapped out, I didn't have any custom modes nor scheduler set up).

My home network setup is on an Apple Airport Extreme router. I did everything he asked and sent him technical details of my setup (with screenshots as proof). So let's see if he sees any obvious patterns... etc.

Thanks for the conversation and reading my rants. And reading all the little tricks you guys have learned from Netgear backrooms is helpful. I wish they're more forthcoming about these quirks (adding notes to my Amazon review list).

[Rudy]

Nice chatting with you as well.

I work from home often as do you, that's how I know my network has been reliable. (Because I have had unreliable ISP's in the past)I have had a few minor issues with the arlo hardware (camera turns red etc) and I must say NetGear support has been great providing a swapped unit in a timely fashioned.

Because their support has been so good, I decided to keep using the product, hoping the issues I am seeing will vanish in future revisions of the application or firmware.

[TheRealDeal]

My cofiguration only has the default 2 modes - on and off but I keep it on. My base station was put in the DMZ at the suggestion of arlo support but the offline problem continues. I might have to try deactivating the cameras and base station as another poster had suggested. My support ticket has been escalated to a higher support level. Hopefully they have the resources to pinpoint the issue.

[poweratom]

My Netgear/Arlo support staff sent me logs for my base station upon my request. I'll start digging through the log as soon as I find out the timezone the files are encoded in. I've also inspected the logs generated by my iPhone to get accustom to the data format and payload. Next time when the cameras go down, hopefully I'll be able to get some insight from my iOS logs + whatever logs Arlo can provide.

[TheRealDeal]

Poweratom, did you gain any insight from the logs? I did a factory reset on my base station and ressynced all the cameras and they still go offline about every 1/2 day. I did notice that after I rebooted the base station and was monitoring the cameras that the base station lost connectivity to the servers (at least that is what the iOS app was telling me). Then less than a minute later it was connected again. Seems like the base station might be dropping connection to the Internet momentarily. I wonder if the other post regarding the base station losing connection to the Internet could be related.

[poweratom]

@TheRealDeal I haven't spent as much time w/ the logs as I'd have liked in the past couple of days... swamped with work. I will be able to in a couple of days.

One thing I noticed was that it seemed like it was the base station that lost connection to the cameras, not the other way around.

Another thing of comfort, based on what I gathered in the logs, is that Netgear is sending everything via encrypted HTTPS protocol. So at least they are not skimping on the security stuff.

The system still goes down on daily basis at least once a day on irregular intervals. I'm able to "ping" the base station from a terminal. So that's something perhaps I can write a script for (to ping it every 10 seconds or something, and and do a IFTTT if the packets drop; then the next step would be to write a headless browser program (say, using phantom.js) to automatically click through the web interface and reboot the system... If I decide to keep the system).

I'll report back once I get a chance to dig through the logs and compare notes with Netgear support (wait, why am I doing this? Shouldn't they be doing this?).

[Cdrridg]

So I have had ZERO issues for the past few weeks. I don't know if netgear has updated the system or what - however the camera is now remaining online between battery changes.

I also switched to rechargeable batteries and am getting great results with the NITECORE RCR123s - 650mah

[poweratom]

I threw in the towel a couple of weeks ago after getting nowhere with Arlo support. The logs didn't really show anything interesting besides very chatting communications between units, the home base and the Arlo servers. But I spent way too much time looking after the tech rather than having a peace of mind. So I decided to return it. I'm glad to hear that your units are finally behaving. Did Arlo issue an update to fix the issue?

I did a pretty extensive review on the product based on the notes I took:

http://smile.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RAC9AEGNCTMGP/

Lastly, I want to thank the Arlo community for being such a kickass place. Where Arlo falls short, the community pretty much filled (most of) the gap. The battery info is just invaluable.

I will check back next year to see where the product features and stability stand. But man, oh man... I wanted to like them so badly.

Peace.