Never Again: Honeywell Home and the Cursed C2 Camera

It all started with the Honeywell C2 Security Camera…  When this device doesn’t have a route to its home cloud storage (thanks Cox for knocking out the internet 14 times this month in Las Vegas, once for over 24 hours), it starts acting… poorly.

The C2 will ignore the DHCP issued IP address and start randomly trying other IP addresses in the last known range to see if THEY have a route to the internet.  Which, because other devices happen to be on my network (gee, not like I’m an engineer or anything) starts to knock other devices off the internal network.  Also happens to drive macOS sharing crazy.  Half the devices in my network now are named something like “Sandy’s Mac-8” now because the Mac tries to grab a new IP via DHCP and renames itself when it detects a conflict.  Redacted versions of the logs are at the bottom of this post.

The only way to know the camera is doing this was to go into my Meraki and find out who the bad player was by MAC address, then disable that MAC from accessing the network and find out what broke.

What do you know.  A Honeywell C2 Security Camera…

Let’s call Support…

First, Honeywell does not make it easy to contact them.  The home electronics part of the company has been spun off into something called Resido, and the phone number has changed multiple times.  (As of 11/12/2018 it’s 1-800-633-3991 BTW.)  Google searches bring up the UK version of the site for some reason.

Support had my information on file from a previous contact (yay) and said that they were not interested in the logs, nobody else had reported this problem, and the camera was defective.

Oooooookay….

So what do I do now, I ask?  Well, go back to the distributor and they handle the warranty.

Wat?  This isn’t a standard alarm piece or some weird distributor, this is something purchased in a retail store.  And Home Depot’s website for the piece actually shows NO information for how to handle warranty claims.  The closest I could get was another Honeywell product on Apple.com which says:

Note: Products sold through this website that do not bear the Apple Brand name are serviced and supported exclusively by their manufacturers in accordance with terms and conditions packaged with the products. Apple’s Limited Warranty does not apply to products that are not Apple-branded, even if packaged or sold with Apple products. Please contact the manufacturer directly for technical support and customer service.
Warranty: Two years

Yep, support says, call Home Depot and try to figure out how to get a warranty replacement…  So off to phone Home Depot.

They, of course, have no idea what is going on.  The online lady recommends that the best way to see if we can solve the problem is to go to a retail store and see if they’ll give me a gift card for a return…

So off to the store…  Their online return system, luckily, does allow the device to be returned for store credit.

Which can’t be used online.

To buy a replacement.  Which is the only place they sell the cameras now.

So at this point I have a lovely $140ish dollar “store credit” that can only be used in a Home Depot physical store to buy something.  Eh, I’m a homeowner, not like something won’t break eventually, but…  I’ll never be replacing something with a Honeywell.

Logs

Time(PST) Client Event type Details
Nov 5 16:59:06 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:01:DC also claims IP: 10.0.0.40”
Nov 3 10:16:52 StupidCamera DHCP lease “vap: 0, vlan: 1, ip: 10.0.0.6”
Nov 2 23:50:26 StupidCamera DHCP problem “extra: no_offers_received, vap: 0, vlan: 1”
Nov 2 23:47:59 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:08:40 also claims IP: 10.0.0.35”
Nov 2 23:47:57 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:A5:48 also claims IP: 10.0.0.86”
Nov 2 23:47:29 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:92:8C also claims IP: 10.0.0.122”
Nov 2 23:47:26 StupidCamera DHCP problem “extra: no_offers_received, vap: 0, vlan: 1”
Nov 2 23:46:05 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:C5:44 also claims IP: 10.0.0.108”
Nov 2 23:45:51 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:C5:44 also claims IP: 10.0.0.107”
Nov 2 23:45:36 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:C5:44 also claims IP: 10.0.0.116”
Nov 2 23:45:21 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:C5:44 also claims IP: 10.0.0.115”
Nov 2 23:45:04 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:C5:44 also claims IP: 10.0.0.114”
Nov 2 23:44:11 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:C5:44 also claims IP: 10.0.0.113”
Nov 2 23:43:58 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:C5:44 also claims IP: 10.0.0.112”
Nov 2 23:43:37 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:C5:44 also claims IP: 10.0.0.111”
Nov 2 23:43:22 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:C5:44 also claims IP: 10.0.0.118”
Nov 2 23:43:08 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:C5:44 also claims IP: 10.0.0.121”
Nov 2 23:42:54 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:C5:44 also claims IP: 10.0.0.126”
Nov 2 23:42:39 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:C5:44 also claims IP: 10.0.0.125”
Nov 2 23:42:24 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:C5:44 also claims IP: 10.0.0.124”
Nov 2 23:42:09 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:C5:44 also claims IP: 10.0.0.123”
Nov 2 23:41:55 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:C5:44 also claims IP: 10.0.0.130”
Nov 2 23:41:48 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:63:8A also claims IP: 10.0.0.229”
Nov 2 23:41:40 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:C5:44 also claims IP: 10.0.0.135”
Nov 2 23:41:27 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:C5:44 also claims IP: 10.0.0.134”
Nov 2 23:41:12 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:C5:44 also claims IP: 10.0.0.133”
Nov 2 23:40:57 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:C5:44 also claims IP: 10.0.0.132”
Nov 2 23:40:43 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:C5:44 also claims IP: 10.0.0.42”
Nov 2 23:38:03 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:2A:76 also claims IP: 10.0.0.206”
Nov 2 23:37:48 StupidCamera Client IP conflict “MAC: X:B1:B8 also claims IP: 10.0.0.230”