MonELOG.local

How does it work?

The MonELOG connects to your local area network via WiFi. The procedure for connecting is outlined here. When your router accepts the connection, it assigns an IP address and necessary routing information to the MonELOG using the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). Depending on your router settings, that IP address will either be a fixed local IP address, or a semi-random IP address chosen from a pool of available addresses.

When you enter MonELOG.local into your browser, your computer uses one of several similar zeroconf protocols to discover the IP address that has been assigned to the MonELOG. These protocols go under several names: Bonjour (Apple) and LLMNR (Microsoft). See the zeroconf link for the detailed WiKi.

Essentially, when you type MonELOG.local intro your browser, the underlying networking layer in your computer broadcasts a datagram message available to all members of the LAN, asking if there is anyone out there that called MonELOG.

At startup, MonELOG creates a process that listens for those datagrams. When it hears it’s name, it responds to the sender saying “I’m MonELOG and my IP address is xx.xx.xx.xx”. The requestor makes a note of this address and uses it to send subsequent transactions to MonELOG.local.

How does that not work?

Sounds simple doesn’t it? What could possibly go wrong?

Plenty. First off, these zeroconf protocols are not part of the standardized internet. If your computer doesn’t have some version of the protocol installed, it won’t work.

There are other issues. Remember that your computer resolves the name and then stores the IP for future use? Well, if the MonELOG gets assigned an IP address from a pool of addresses, it can change without your computer knowing it. That is a common problem. Your computer can talk to the MonELOG for days or weeks and then suddenly it stops. It’s possible the MonELOG restarted or it’s DHCP lease expired and it got a different IP address. Some computers will simply never think to broadcast a new query, insisting on unsuccessfully retrying the old IP address forever.

How to make it work better.

It is recommended that you to assign a static IP to the MonELOG right after installation. You do this in your router and should assign an IP address that is not in the DHCP pool, so there is no opportunity for conflict. Your router associates the specified IP address with the MAC address of the MonELOG and always gives it that address during the DHCP handshake at startup. Write it down. If you subsequently find that you can’t access via MonELOG.local, you can use the IP address by typing HTTP://xx.xx.xx.xx as a URL in the browser.

If you are reading this because you didn’t assign a static IP and now can’t access your MonELOG with MonELOG.local, you may need to turn off your computer and the MonELOG, restart your router, then restart your computer and the MonELOG.

What else?

Throughout this section, we have been using the name MonELOG.local. If you changed the name of the MonELOG using the Device setup of the configuration app, you would appended .local to that name. If you changed the name to ttawatoi you would use ttawatoi.local.

The last word

Fix the IP and write it down.