OBI Offline

[mrcinaz]

Yesterday afternoon, I replaced my somewhat ancient modem and router with a new "all-in-one" modem/router.

The good news is the internet speed doubled for all connected computers. 

The bad news is my telephone is dead.

The OBI is a model 202.
The router device is Arris Surfboard model SBG10.

The OBI is configured with Phonepower Obi Lite on SP2, and GV numbers on SP1, SP3, and SP4. 
However none of these is working. The reason is that the OBITalk dashboard says the OBI is "offline". My biggest problem is that I have no clue what that means. 

The OBI's static IP shows up in the routers active client list. Every other device on my LAN has WAN access.  (Wired and wireless, static and dynamic IPs)  The router and modem are clearly working.  I see no obvious reason for the OBI to be "offline".   

I have pretty much exhausted my feeble bag of tricks:
-  Rebooted the OBI a gazillion times
-  Forwarded inbound port 10000 to the OBI IP.
-  Disabled ALG SIP
-  Put the OBI IP in DMZ.

I am stumped. 

[SteveInWA]

This sounds like a bad Ethernet cable or a dead Ethernet port.  Try replacing the cable with a high-quality, known-good cable.  Try plugging the non-OBi end into a different Ethernet port.  The SBG10 only has two Ethernet ports.  If you are daisy-chaining it through an Ethernet switch, try instead plugging the OBi directly into one of the two ports on the SBG10.

Does it work now?  If you pick up the phone, you should hear a dial tone.  If so, key in ***1 and see if it reads back its IP address.  If so, try accessing that page on your browser.  The username/password are admin/admin.

[mrcinaz]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the suggestions. The issue does not appear to have anything to do with the cable. It worked perfectly on the old router.  My main reason for replacing the router was basically because it had a recently discovered gaping security hole which D-Link has no plans to fix because they consider it obsolete.  Since  the modem (a Moto SB6120 was also EOL (an early DOCSIS 3.0 that was maxed out by the increased speed from Xfinity), I decided it was time to upgrade. 

As you mention, the SBG10 has two gigabit ports. One of them was cabled to the gigabit switch to which all my wired devices are connected. I moved the non-OBI end of the OBI's cable from that switch to the spare port on the router. There is no difference in behavior.   (Not surprised.  The cabling through the switch has also worked for years.)

I then tried your "***1" suggestion. It read back the static IP address and stated that DHCP was disabled.  The message seems to mean that it is a static IP, which is true.  Not much info there except the Obi is working.

I have no trouble logging into the Obi's Web interface.  (But, my password is much longer than "admin".  <g>) 

Some additional food for thought:
===============
A loooong time ago, I configured the Obi to write to syslog.  (I can't even remember now where the heck that is enabled in the settings.)  At the time, I also installed a program called "Syslog Watcher" on my main desktop. Recalling that, I fired up the syslog watcher service.  With the telephone on hook, I see the same logged activity sequence over and over:

1.  SNTP:Wait 6000
2.  BASE:resolving root.pnn.obihai.com  (wait 30 seonds)
3.  BASE:resolving root.pnn.obihai.com  (wait 30 seonds)
This is repeated three times. Then:
DNS:   All servers are not responding!
(Then repeat from the top)

It appears to me that the issue may be that the OBI can't get DNS.

[mrcinaz]

Problem solved.

What I had to do was go into the "Wan Settings", under "Router Confoguration" and enter the IPs of the XFinity DNS Servers.

Saved.  Rebooted.  It instantly reconnected and reprovisioned.  All services now working.

It has been working for years on the old router with the router gateway IP configured as the DNS server. The light finally dawned that this router obviously does not provide DNS.  You have to manually configure it.

For some reason, the windows computers are still getting DNS OK configured with the router IP as DNS server, but the OBI is clearly not happy with that setting with this router.

[drgeoff]

Humour me by dialling the echo test number **9 222 222 222. If you do not hear "Welcome to Obitalk and ..." then you have not solved the underlying issue.

[mrcinaz]

It says:  "Welcome to..." 

All is well.  Believe me, the issue was entirely with DNS.

The only thing the Obi needed to go online was:
DNSSERVER1   75.75.75.75
DNSSERVER2   75.75.76.76
Instead of:
DNSSERVER1   192.168.1.1
DNSSERVER2   empty

It would probably also have worked if I had reserved the fixed IP to the OBI's MAC in the router and set the Obi to use DHCP.  (The way I configure my ROKUs.)

[SteveInWA]

This is what we call a "self-inflicted beat-down".  If only you had left things alone, and not messed with a static IP address and DNS, it would have simply worked.

Now, if you want to use a better DNS, I suggest using Google's high-performance DNS, at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4  You can enter that in your router, so that all of your attached devices simply use that DNS.