BT Premium Whole Home WiFi disks reset themselves - DNS issues

[AndyRE78]

I have 4 x BT Premium Whole Home WiFi disks, with 1 connected to my BT Smart Hub 2 acting as the main.

The other 3 are in various rooms in my large house (connected wirelessly to this main hub)

1 x disc is in my home office which my desktop computer and is connected to the Discs ethernet port.

1 x disc is in my wifes office which has her desktop computer and Xbox connected to the ethernet ports.

1 x disc is in my living room which has our Sky streaming puck and my Xbox connected, again to the ethernet ports.

Upon original setup I changed the network name on the discs to a custom name and everything has been working fine since setting everything up over 3 years ago.

However on Saturday morning I awoke to find all the discs had reset back to factory settings as the WiFi name had reset back to BT Whole Home Premium.  We had not had any power cut, nor had I or my wife intentionally attempted a reset of the hubs.

I went round and turned off all 4 discs, powered the main one connected to the BT Smart Hub 2 and it came back up with a blue light, but again the network name was still BT Whole Home Premium.

Using the Whole Home App on my iPhone I had to effectively set everything up again, I was able to successfully link all the discs, rename the network and devices can successfully connect via WiFi and can connect to the internet.

However the issue is with devices which are connected via ethernet cable to the discs.  Once connected they indicate they have a network connection but when going to a web page (e.g. bt.com) it doesnt connect, with the standard browser warning page (stating DNS) as one of the possible issues.

On my desktop PC, wifes computer, Xbox's etc I have had to within their network settings specifically state a DNS server address to use (1.1.1.1).  After doing this these cabled connected devices connect to the internet without issue.  Prior to this issue I did not have to do this.  WiFi devices are unaffected by this.

Has this ever happened to anyone else before, if so what did you do to resolve?  Is this likely to happen again or is it a sign the discs are developing a fault?

The discs Firmware was last updated in 2023 to SGAB208426.

The only thing I have not done is to manually reset each disc back to factory myself and start again (which I really don't want to do but if it's the only solution I will have to).

Thank you for any guidance/assistance in advance.

[naylor2006]

This makes me glad I never got around to creating a custom SSID on my Wholehome Standard discs....wow that must have been a pain setting up again.

DNS is usually deployed in the DHCP config on your router and as you are using the Smart Hub the DNS IP will be the same IP as your smarthub, 192.168.0.1 usually or something like that, I forget what BT use as I use my own router.

Sounds like the wired devices perhaps arent getting back to the router for DNS queries if setting the Cloudflare DNS manually works on the local NICs. Whilst leaving the computers network settings set to automatic you could open a command prompt on windows and enter ipconfig /all and this will actually list the DNS server assigned to it, you could do this on the wired devices to check if they are indeed even seeing the router, the DNS server will be the same as your default gateway if youve not messed around with the routers default settings.

I expect you have already done this but it might be worth powering off all the discs then restarting the router, if the discs somehow reset themselves they may not be communicating with the DHCP server properly since they came back up.

Sadly though, I think you may end up factory resetting all the discs.

The BT Premium discs are a weird beast where they have to be daisy chained to each other via ethernet (outside of MESH) instead of just connecting back to the router.....therefore you cant isolate the issue by connecting a disc that isnt the master directly to the router.

[AndyRE78 · Accepted solution]

So after spending a couple of hours messing around with settings it became clear the only course of action was to perform a full factory reset of all 4 discs and setup again from scratch.

Following instructions on the BT site I reset each disc, deleted the App from my iPhone, re-installed the App, setup the discs as a new install and can confirm all is working now with DNS now being automatically addressed by the discs.

I still don't know what caused the discs to reset and cause the DNS to not resolve correctly thus am monitoring the setup in closer detail now.  I am however considering replacing the setup because of this issue happening and some other odd issues that happen from time to time (Disk names resetting to default, not showing connected devices in the App yet stating a value on the Disc Information screen in the App).

[naylor2006]

Yeah mind do weird stuff too sometimes, they stopped crashing once I put ethernet to them all directly back to the router, so there is no Mesh'ing any more, just WIFI AP functionality. 

Every now and then though they stop showing new devices connected to the WIFI, its like they are forgotten, rebooting just the master disk seems to fix this, although its not really required because the WIFI still works fine, I just lose sight of some devices. I've also named everything that connects day to day in my house in the app so I know what it is, it forgets these names sometimes and I then have to re-add them again.

With AC2600 models I have they are dumb as well in the sense you cannot force them to connect to one disk, or at least have a preference, even after setting 'Daisy Chain' setting as preferred, which cannot be done in the app actually but by visiting the disk GUI itself on a web browser. It became frustrating because mine were daisy chained via WIFI carefully to get solid WIFI to certain corners of the house, if the disks all rebooted because they crashed or because the master disk rebooted randomly the daisy chain would not come back optimally, I would find all of the remote disks would all connect back to the master urrrgh.  I would have to switch every disk off, power on the master, wait till it was up then do each disk ensuring it connected to its closest neighbour. Although they are designed to find the strongest link I didnt find this to happen.

With the premium disks you daisy chain via ethernet to each other which solves my problem I guess but then creates another which is if you want to hardline them all your cabling needs to go the route of the disks, seems nuts.

With that said they have been great and have been really useful over the 5 years ive had them, especially now I have got ethernet to each one removing the mesh element, this now leaves me in a position to get any AP solution and utilize POE.

I forgot to say originally, there is logs you can look at, at least there is on the AC2600 (non premium) if you take the admin password and visit the master disks actual IP address there is logs, now that they are factory reset I guess it useless but if it happens again you can check there.