Gateway Pucks do dns lookup on api.flair.co every few seconds

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Greg Friedman

I'm seeing my gateway pucks do dns lookups on api.flair.co every few seconds. Is this a known issue? 

Thanks.

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    James C.

    Hi Greg Friedman,

    The Puck uses a polling architecture and checks in regularly in case there are updates from the cloud side.

    Flair does have frequent calls, however, these contain considerably small amounts of data and should not be of concern unless you have limited internet data. Comparatively speaking, Netflix and other streaming services use much more data.

    Regards,

    The Flair Team

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    Michael Klebolt

    This is great but if your using a free tier dns service, flair will very quickly put you over that amount of free requests, forcing you to pay for unlimited lookups. It would be nice to be able to adjust the polling interval.

    When I look at the logs, flair is always #1 on the number of requests from my entire household....by a LOT.

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    Michael Klebolt

    Looks like it's polling every 5 seconds. Whereas my other smart devices are only every 20-30 seconds. Over a months time this makes a huge difference.

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    Romain Wurtz

    Came here to express the same concern; our Puck is making an unreasonable amount of DNS requests in comparison to other devices like Philips Hue, Google Nest, and Sonos on our network. I'm seeing over 650 DNS calls within the last 30 minutes vs 20 for our Nest.

    James C. do you mind checking with your developers? Perhaps it's a simple caching issue.

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    Steve McAfee

    I have 5 pucks and my dns server says they have looked up api.flair.co over 900,000 times in the last 90 days. I have one gateway puck. Can't you have the gateway cache this for a while?

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    Michael Klebolt

    Per a flair support ticket I opened, the engineering team is aware of the issue and is working on a fix to bring the polling interval in line with other smart devices. No ETA on a release at this time.

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    Greg Friedman

    When did you open the ticket? I’ve been using Flair for a couple of years and in that time it has not been clear that there is any ongoing engineering happening on the software. N updates to mobile apps, the website, the backend, or pucks that I’ve been aware of. They’ve shipped some new vent sizes, but that is all I know about. I wondered if there’s any active engineering happening at all.

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    Michael Klebolt

    8/26 is when I opened the ticket. My android app was updated 9/12, so I know they're doing Android development. But I imagine the DNS issue will require a firmware update of the pucks.

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    Greg Friedman

    Interesting. The last iOS app update was 11 months ago.

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    Tony Eckel100

    My two cents: I agree that every 5 seconds is way too much - ESPECIALLY if there is no failure with the local cached value in the puck. Given the low power nature of the puck, it would seem imprudent to spend so much time/energy repeating a DNS query when there are so many better things to accomplish with the limited battery power.

    My DNS data shows that api.flair.co is being requested at 10 times the rate of any other request. It isn't like the entry changes frequently or the puck can't store four bytes of data....(okay - maybe 64)

    As for updates to software - Flair can choose to be a software provider or a Hardware provider, but not both. If the protocols to acess the hardware were opened, tons of devices would race off the shelf as independent developers create new solutions and integrations with the platform. If Flair wants to be a software developer, it needs to give away the hardware and sell software to make the devices valuable (e.g. like an inkjet printer). Better off opening the systems and supporting independent developers with open and semicustom solutions.

     

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    Jason Weltch

    This is creating a mess on my router logs. If I were to blocked it at the router will it completely kill functionality?  Is there some other way to limit the requests?

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    James C.

    Tom C

    You asked "Any update on this? 1.1M queries in a month for my system. This is nuts!".

    This is a known behavior of our Flair Pucks but the size of these packets is VERY small so it should not have a performance impact to your home devices.  We have had others notice this and mention it and I will add your thoughts to the thread about this topic that is shared with our engineering department. 

     

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    flair

    So you've known for over a year your firmware is garbage borderline abusive to the local network and for most of the time you ignored it and now all you have is "its not that bad"?

    Do better.

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    Robb H

    Just jumping in here to keep this issue alive. Any plans to change this behavior in 2025? 

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    Tony Eckel100

    I agree - DNS TTLs are on the order of 4 hours (generally) so polling every twenty odd seconds (720X) seems excessive even to the most liberal....

     

    T

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