I've had two Hubitat C5 hubs for over a year. Never had many issues until a few days ago. I don't think it is a problem with the hubs themselves because both are experiencing the same connectivity loss to the cloud. What has changed within the last week is setting up the two hubs into a mesh. But I think the problem is how I changed how they connect.
Originally my main production hub was plugged into an 8 port ethernet switch that connects to my main router. My other hub was plugged into a different 8 port switch also connecting back to the main router.
I recently relocated my second hub to the same floor of the production hub but due to lack of open ports on my other switch I connected another 4 port switch (connecting the two Hubitats) and connecting that to the last open port on my 8 port switch.
So my question is, is it permissible to plug a ethernet switch into another switch that connects back to the router? I have done this with plenty of other devices such as computers, cameras, etc and none of them seem to be bothered by it except the Hubitats. When I first hooked the hubs under the new configuration they worked fine for hours and then lost connection to the cloud. I still have full control of the hub locally. Right now I have both hubs back to their original connection and watching to see if the problem abaits.
That should not be a problem, so long as everything is part of the same LAN (I.e. no double NAT, no special firewalls, etc...) What is important is that your Hubitat Hubs’ IP addresses don’t change. Please be sure to reserve an IP a address for each of your Hubitat hubs via your router’s DHCP server settings. This will help to keep the Hubitat Cloud connection available without interruption.
Don't know if it is permissible, but I do it and it works for me. Switch > Router > Modem. In fact I have some devices that go Router "A" > Switch > Router "B" > Modem. Somehow it all works! But only Router "B" assigns DHCP addresses, which is why I think it all plays nice.
AFAICR, you can plug as many switches into a network, and cascade as many as you like. You will just increase the overall latency of the connections that are furthest away from you main switch, which for domestic installs is usually your router. Other than that, you shouldn’t get any problems.
Thanks everyone. I wasn't sure. I moved the Hubitat hubs back to their original spot and they are still dropping cloud connection so I must have an issue on my network somewhere.
I am still losing connection to the cloud on both of my Hubitat hubs. I'm pretty sure it isn't caused by the hubs themselves but they are getting cut off from reaching the internet.
My question is, how does the hub determine if it's connected to the cloud? Does it utilize ping? Or is there some other method?
Is there anyone connecting their hub to a Synology rt2600ac router? Reason for asking is I believe it's the router blocking the hubs from the internet. If I reboot the hubs they will stay connected to the cloud and then at some point later loose connectivity.
To finish out this thread and in case others run into this problem, I have found the cause of the cloud connection problem. Using the Synology Router RT2600AC and probably other Synology products, within the Network Center there is a section for DoS Protection. It is enabled by default and was locking out my Hubitat's from connecting to the cloud. Disabling DoS corrected the connectivity problems. It was also blocking a Raspberry Pi running Node-Red.
