JACKPOT. No. I hadnāt, since they donāt have reservations, so I wouldnāt know their IPs. They will soon, because that would have shown me the problem. They were not getting IPs, because of a dhcp server failure, not a Wyze-blocking problem.
Mods: Please update subject āDHCP problem bricks company DVR systemā, as I know now it was not the fault of Wyze blocking anything.
Iām sorry, and embarrassed to have wasted your time on this when the ball was in our court. Theyāre all online now, and weāll be fixing the office network mistakes on our side that led to this.
I might also suggest a WiFi fallback feature. In other words, remember each WiFi network used, and if the current one ādoesnāt workā, then fall back to the most recently used, then second most recently, etc.
Itād probably be too advanced for 1-5 cam home users. But for large installations >30, it would be nice to have a screen in the app, where you could add WiFi network profiles to the āaccountā. That list could pre-populate with any WiFi network profile in use on any camera on the account. The user could order the networks in the global list to assign a preference to each one. Then per-camera, they could override that preference order. The cloud could push down updates to this list to all cameras on the account, and if one WiFi network fails, they would fail over to the secondary. This system could also then be used to (safely) change the WiFi network a cam is using, without physically touching it. So for instance when a cam gets installed in a theft-resistant location (read: hard to physically access), it can still be maintained over time as WiFi networks update.
What Iāll probably end up doing until this feature is created is buy another complete set of every cam we have, and just put two in each location side by side, on separate wifi networks.
I know it sounds like overkill. But maintaining continuous operation in spite of technical problems is important for security. Especially for a company.
I thought that local recording would work when WiFi was down as well, and that was a major selling point to me with Wyze, but Iām learning now I was mistaken on that too, if WiFi is down for a long time. And I think thatās an opportunity to improve the product as well. Local recording by default, and at all times if a MicroSD card is present. The act of inserting a MicroSD card itself is a statement by the user that the sole purpose of that card is to store continuous recording video. I guess one could use it just for time lapses, but we can agree thatās much less common.
At home Iāve gone the multi-vendor route, maintaining in parallel, systems from Wyze, Nest, Ring, and cheap Chinese wired cams on a zoneminder box. Usually only one has an issue at any given time.
Also, once the cameras have WiFi fallback, they can communicate the failure, and the nature of the failure of their primary wifi when they connect to the fallback wifi network, and it can communicate that to the user.
For instance, when my Nest Smoke alarm looses WiFi connection, or electricity, I get a notice from Nest that starts my troubleshooting in the right direction.
