Came home today to find out my streaming stick could not find my media server, which is a raspberry pi.
So I tried to use my phone to login to the pi graphically via RealVNC. It timed out repeatedly. Last time that happened, I had the pi wirelessly connected to the wrong router. I verified that was not the case by checking the active connections on both routers.
The only difference is pi can only see 2.4 ghz band and my other devices are all connect via 5 ghz. But as implied, this set up had worked for a long time.
My phone could also not login to the media server and got a server offline/destination could not be contacted general message.
I unplugged and replugged the pi thinking it had crashed. No progress. Same results.
My laptop though could ssh into the pi. So I knew it was online and again verified the network it was on. I did reboot via ssh and that did not fix my phone accessing it. I also installed RealVNC on the laptop for the first time and it immediately connected to the pi.
It was like my laptop and pi were on one subnet seeing each other and my phone and streaming stick were not a part of it (not sure if they could see each other, didn't test.) But the local IP addresses were all 192.168.1.xxx for each device, and all are reserved, so as from previous statement, that set up had worked.
My last ditch attempt after pondering for the longest time was perhaps restart the router. It had gone 31 days without a restart. And that fixed it. My phone and laptop could RealVNC and connect to the media servers nicely. (Come to think of it I didn't test the streaming stick after all this, but it probably works.)
The router runs OpenWRT installed a few months ago. It has pbr and openvpn extensions to it.
I can only guess that somehow, some way the long router runtime resulted in a bug as that was the longest I let it run continuously. Repeatable, maybe? I'd be curious about trying to run the 31 days again and see if on 4/1 we have problems.
Just posting this on here in case anyone had an idea on why things broke, why a restart of router fixed it, and in case someone comes across this on google and hasn't tried to restart openwrt yet can try doing so.
