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Nest WiFi + Mesh week 1

Today is either day 8 or 9 of me having deployed the Nest Mesh WiFi in my house replacing my beloved Portal. For the most part you know something is good by when you don’t think about it much, and for the past week I have not really thought about the Nest WiFi + Mesh much.

I have one device that refuses to talk to it. I *highly* suspect that this is the $12 smart bulb’s issue as it’s been a running pain for a while for other reasons. But other than $12 of janky electronics this held up admirably until 4am last night.

I’m up at 4am. I’ve got a sick kid and was insomnia man again anyway. I’m doing what I do – reading comics across an SMB connection WiFi to LAN from an Android running Perfect Viewer looking at comics from before I was born. It’s something I do.

I went to turn the page and things stopped. After a bit I was informed I didn’t have an internet connection and I started investigating. I didn’t. The whole house was down and the WiFi claimed it had no internet.

I checked the Fiber Modem, it was up and appeared happy. It’s never disconnected a LAN port before so I checked and nope, sure enough it appeared to be working.

The solution was to unplug and plug the Nest WiFi + Mesh base unit back in (power). Bam, started working immediately. I did a little snooping around and cannot locate any logs or anything useful to tell me what the cause was, but I highly suspect that it’s some issue with Windows File Sharing / Samba WiFi to LAN as it waited until I was awake and doing that to lock up.

I would have assumed it would have locked up at some point I wasn’t looking. When something breaks and I’m there doing something I have to assume it’s probably me.

If it only locks up doing that, I’ll be happy. But if it locks at any other time, man that’s not useful considering I’m running WiFi security cameras on it.

2022 06 30 16.44.31 - for some reason we don't have an alt tag here

Something I was pretty pleased to find while investigating what I could find is that it has bandwidth statistics by device and can tell you what’s used bandwidth, and what is using bandwidth. Extremely useful if you’re dealing with a data cap.

I went ahead and changed the default DNS it was giving out. I appeared to be using a whole lot of Google DNS servers and that’s… strange. My AT&T modem gives out AT&T DNS. Then again, this is a 4am half asleep tech looking at a DNS server report so I may have read that wrong.

I changed over to Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS with a Google 8.8.8.8 backup. Discovered you have to press the save icon in order to save as opposed to what it appears to do in other menus which is just accept it and save it. No big.

I remain cautiously optimistic that this is just a Samba issue because who does that in network? Here’s hoping no more lockups. (this was not to be the case)

Future / previous Nest Wifi + Mesh articles

The Home test

Day 1 – initial impressions
Week 1 – the first lockup
Week 3 – the thing operated ok
Week 5 – Yikes, it’s so unreliable I’m going to replace it
Week 6 – Playing with Family Safety / restricted while trying to fix the thing
Week 6+ – all the lockups I’ve had with the unit
Week 7 – after a suggestion from a reader lockups appear to have resolved – yeah, no, they didn’t 15 hours later
Week 7 – have removed the unit from my network and purchased a different brand router because it just wasn’t stable

After giving up, the corporate test
Day 1 – initial impressions in commercial world (day 55)
Day 7 – locks up with next to no usage, no devices connected (day 62) – this one contains a possible retraction
Sometime after day 7 – soapbox, I am on it.
Day 21 – Mesh unit disappears, two reboots later it’s back (day 83)
Day 30 or so, giving up

Related to the product line

The Nest Wifi Pro having issues – how utterly shocking


Product links: Amazon, Google Nest Store

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Paul E King

Paul King started with GoodAndEVO in 2011, which merged with Pocketables, and as of 2018 he's evidently the owner. He lives in Nashville, works at a film production company, is married with two kids. Facebook | Twitter | Donate | More posts by Paul | Subscribe to Paul's posts

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