Cranky Oldman

for what it's worth, I'll share my experience buying an older Pakedge SX-24P on eBay to expand my network. The main reason I picked Pakedge was because it has the network ports on the back of the unit, just like the Araknis switches and router that my Control4 dealer sold me, so it fits into an empty slot on the same rack without looking strange. The Pakedge is working fine but one thing I hadn't anticipated is that the LED's, both front and rear, are blue and very, very bright. As far as I can tell, there is no way to turn them off from the UI (unlike my much-newer Araknis switches that allow LED's to be turned off). My rack is in a closet next to a room where I watch TV, and the bright blue pulsing light from the Pakedge switch finds its way under the door, which is super annoying when you're trying to watch something in a dark room. I could block the light by filling the gap at the bottom of the door but that gap is there to let some ventilation air into the closet. So I ended up covering the Pakedge LED's with black tape which was time consuming. Also I wasn't smart enough to think about rack ears when I went shopping for a switch on eBay. Lots of switches are sold with rack ears, but not the one I bought... doh! So I had to buy those separately and it probably took me at least an hour to figure out exactly what size and hole spacing was needed and then to find a matching set on Amazon, wait a couple of days for delivery, and install them. More time was consumed troubleshooting a problem getting a secure https: connection to work with the Pakedge. Browsers report "ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH". I Googled that and found a couple of suggested workarounds, but bottom line is the switch doesn't correctly support modern SSL standards. It's not a big issue on a private network, but it's one more thing that sucked up some time and made me start to regret my purchase. Also you mentioned VLAN's and wondered about mixing and matching brands in that context: well, I have 5 VLAN's running, and I didn't have any real problems with getting the Pakedge to work with them, but I definitely lost some time -- maybe 1/2 hour -- on the learning curve because the Pakedge method of configuring VLAN's was sufficiently different from the Araknis method that I made a couple of little missteps along the way. I'm retired so the "time is money" axiom doesn't really apply, but certainly if I was on the clock I would have been further ahead to buy a brand new "expensive" Araknis and have it work immediately, vs. this "cheap" used Pakedge that ate up many hours dealing with the issues described above. YMMV!

Same thing happened to me when my dealer updated my controller to 3.4.1 in January... HE didn't work until the end of February when C4 released an update that solved the problem. Check your version number: I'm on 3.4.1 Build 706039 which appears to still be the latest version. You can login to your account and download the update from here: https://customer.control4.com/composerhe

Does anyone else have an Anthem receiver with Stream and Bluetooth options that appear in four different experience menus in every room of their house? On my system, they show up in Comfort, Listen, Security and Watch in every room, including rooms that don't have any audio or video connections. Is that normal, or is there a configuration issue that I can fix? eg. is there some place to configure which experience menu these items are offered in? and is there a way to limit what rooms these items are offered in? All my other AV devices only appear in the Listen or Watch menus, and only in rooms that have audio or video equipment in them. The attached images show how they appear in a room with no AV connections that has no reason to ever be linked to the Anthem receiver.

one of the luxuries of being retired is I can spend almost unlimited amounts of time making things like this work the way I think they should work. No more 80/20 rule for me! A younger me would have thought it was crazy too!

lol! thanks for the arpwatch reference; I haven't used that yet. will check it out

You're right that the random-guy-in-the-driveway scenario is low risk, but it probably won't surprise you if you've read this far in the thread that I'm more paranoid than most people about these things! I set up the VLAN for the Control4 network with a whitelist of MAC addresses that are permitted to use the network. So a random device that shows up in the driveway with the SSID/passkey will get connected to the access point, but won't get network access. It was a bit of a pain to set up the whitelist initially, but once in place it shouldn't require any maintenance unless I change hardware somewhere in my system. If I need a house call from my dealer at some point, I'll have to turn off access control or add his phone/PC to the whitelist.

Thanks msgreenf! that was too easy once you told me where to look. Crossing that item off my to-do list!

another timely comment! I was just in the middle of figuring out why some of the functionality on the Control4 website (voice control) wasn't working and I tracked it down to pfBlockerNG DNSBL blocking the domains events.split.io, sdk.split.io, and auth.split.io. Looks like I'm going to have to whitelist them, at least temporarily. my Control4 system is in a new house and the original network installation was done during construction by the Control4 dealer using an Araknis router that didn't have the advanced features that I was used to with pfSense, so as soon as the dealer finished his work I upgraded to a pfSense box and carefully rebuilt the network with VLANs and lots of rules to segregate Control4 from other IoT devices and from my private LAN, while trying not to break any Control4 functionality or block the dealer's ability to provide remote support. Generally that conversion was successful although I did manage to break some things along the way, earning appropriate feedback from my wife! I've learned not to make changes while she's in front of the TV! One security hole I'm wrestling with is the fact that my Control4 dealer, or any of his staff, currently have the ability to remotely connect to my system and turn off my security alarm, unlock my front door, and turn off my security cameras. I'd like to figure out how to block that access by default, and only open it up when I have a specific need for support. But I haven't spent any time yet figuring out if that is possible/practical to implement without breaking my own remote access to my system. It's on my to-do list as I continue to climb the C4 learning curve!

I'm not worried about legitimate Control4 activity, but 3 times in my working life I had linux-based devices from reputable companies compromised by malware and turned into zombies inside the company network. So I'm always a bit paranoid when I see network traffic I don't understand coming out of a device like that. Best to block it first and ask questions later!

Thanks Popolou for your comments. Your reference to cloud-based instances appears to be spot-on. I searched the Control4 controller logs for the link-local IP address, and found matching entries in the file "c4metricsd.log". The timestamps in the sample below match the timestamps for packets my router blocked. 2024-03-25 14:51:08.520 -0500 core5-000FFF9CC615 [1312] ERROR: AWS: [CurlHttpClient] Curl returned error code 28 - Timeout was reached 2024-03-25 14:51:08.520 -0500 core5-000FFF9CC615 [1312] ERROR: AWS: [EC2MetadataClient] Http request to retrieve credentials failed 2024-03-25 14:51:09.522 -0500 core5-000FFF9CC615 [1312] ERROR: AWS: [CurlHttpClient] Curl returned error code 28 - Timeout was reached 2024-03-25 14:51:09.522 -0500 core5-000FFF9CC615 [1312] ERROR: AWS: [EC2MetadataClient] Http request to retrieve credentials failed 2024-03-25 14:51:09.522 -0500 core5-000FFF9CC615 [1312] ERROR: AWS: [EC2MetadataClient] Can not retrive resource from http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone We can see there is some kind of Curl command that is failing, apparently related to Amazon Web Services. Google found some matches for the string "http://169.254.169.254latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone" eg. Getting Ec2 Instance Availability Zone With Curl or Powershell // ShellRunner So it looks the Control4 software may be designed to run in a virtual environment, in which case these packets might gather useful info. Not sure why the controller still sends out these requests when running in a local hardware environment. I suppose this could be a way of testing "am I in a virtual environment?" In any event, other than triggering some red-herring paranoia about bots infiltrating my network, the behavior appears to be benign

Thanks Topfox... those pictures are going to be really helpful getting me started on the right track. Appreciate you taking the time to post them

Thanks Topfox for the reference to Pico remotes... that might be just the ticket for a couple of rooms in the house. To make that work, it looks like I would need a Lutron hub, correct? Does a single hub cover a whole house?

I only have one matrix switcher for audio. There is a separate switcher for video but the three rooms I was trying to link are all audio-only. I think for now I'll just put this issue aside. Maybe at some point down the road the root cause of the problem will become apparent. Meanwhile I'm realizing I need to be really careful about interactions between my various automations -- my programming above unintentionally triggered a separate "entertaining" automation linked to the dining room audio that I created a few weeks ago. I might have to start documenting some of this stuff!

Thanks again SAC4 for your pointers... I've also benefitted from many of your other posts spanning many years that have turned up while searching this forum -- so thanks for the help as I climb the C4 learning curve! After getting the initial two-room control sorted out, I moved on to a three-room situation, and was surprised by a little glitch that I'm wondering if you've ever encountered: when adding two rooms with "Sync Source Between Rooms", only the second room in the list is successfully being added to the session. After testing many permutations of settings, I found I could get it to work by adding the rooms with separate programming steps, but only if I put a 1 second delay between adding the two rooms. Attached screenshot shows the single step that doesn't work (grayed out) and the two-step-plus-delay combo that does work. Seems like the controller or maybe the matrix switch needs some time to process the addition of the first room before moving on to the second? In case it's not obvious from the screenshot, the intent here is if someone initiates a Listen session in the study, then we want to automatically add the dining room and office to the session. Also fyi I tried variations adding between 3 and 8 rooms with a single line of programming, and it always resulted in only the last one of the listed rooms being added. I also was curious about how long the time delay needed to be for this to work, so I varied it in 100 ms steps, and on my system the code didn't work unless the delay was at least 900 ms. I decided to round that up to 1 whole second for the code in the screenshot.

SAC4 -- you were right, the room control driver seems to be working. I now have the synchronization of audio and video sources working between the two rooms. I still have some work to do to get volume control and on/off control working the way I want it to, but I expect that will fall into place as well.