Thanks for the quick reply. Sorry it took so long, it seems this forum had connection issues today (was getting bad gateway and 404 errors for hours).
I was able to get it working, but I don't know for sure what the issue was. The fix was to power off my router adapter/extender, then restart the Obi after it should have detected an internet connection. It was more or less normal after that, but the obi web addresses have been slow since last night. Both the forum and the Obitalk dashboard.
Question: since I probably was not getting a true internet connection when it was "offline", what is the procedure to ping the Obi device? I don't remember how I did this years ago, it hasn't been necessary.
What I recall was you would have to pick up the telephone and dial a code for it to read out the IP address. But what if you don't have one or can't find it? Then, how do you ping the Obi?