Google Home Mini and Cisco 5508 WLC

[kevinpendergast]

Hi there,

Trying to connect a Google Home Mini to Guest WIFI SSID and no luck. I was able to connect an Amazon Echo but not Google Home Mini.

[andrew.butterworth]

The 2504 has two other SSID's that map to different VLANs so its not really feasible to move the 2504 to the other side of the TP-Link without breaking the other SSID's.  Plus its physically in another location.

I might spin up a Catalyst 9800 Cloud Controller as I have a spare 3702i and do some playing with that if I can find some time.  Not keen on that as a solution though as its reliant on the ESXi infrastructure - house of cards etc...  We don't have any Cat 9300's we could containerise it on.

[Scott Fella]

The 9800-CL is also supported on hyper-v.

[andrew.butterworth]

It appears the Google have pushed firmware version 1.49.218411 to some Google Home devices and this breaks things if the WiFi is unsecured.  It seems setup won't complete if the network is not secured.  Not sure why the three I have broke as there has never been a password on the IoT WLAN (there is MAC filtering but no WPA/WPA2 policy).

I have since added WPA2/PSK to the IoT WLAN and ran through the setup successfully on one of the units.  I'll try the other two later, but based on what I managed to find out it appears this is the issue:

https://www.reddit.com/r/googlehome/comments/hvmc16/google_home_mini_acting_up/

I'll need to go around and reconfigure some other devices now.  pita

Andy

[andrew.butterworth]

The 'fix' was to secure the SSID with a PSK.  I changed the SSID to WPA2/PSK and then re-joined the Google Home Mini's and Chromecast and its been fine since.

Google simply didn't tell anyone when they pushed this firmware out.  I think most home WLANs are secured so maybe they didn't foresee this issue.

[Paul.Ostaszewski]

I have WPA+WPA2 security running on my main SSID with WPA2 Policy, WPA2 Encryption as AES and PSK enabled.  Anything else I should look at?  I see that 8.5.164.0(ED) is available - do you think that will solve my issue?  I hate upgrading the software because sometimes previous bugs are re-introduced.

Again, I can get them to connect and they work, but the options in the google home app for each device doesn't work (I get "Connect to your WiFi to Cast") and I can't create speaker groups.  So clearly the google home app sees they're installed but can't communicate with them?

[Paul.Ostaszewski]

Just wanted to let everyone know I fixed it by adding 3 mDNS services manually under Controller > mDNS > General.

Chromecast _googlecast._tcp.local.

GoogleDiscover _googlerpc._tcp.local.

GoogleDiscover2 _googlezone._tcp.local.

For GoogleDiscover and GoogleDiscover2 I wasn't sure what they did exactly so I made up those two names as the Service Name.

I noticed these 3 services were listed under Controller > mDNS > mDNS Browser.  You can hover over the down arrow next to the item and choose add service or you can add them manually under Controller > mDNS > General.  If you choose to do them manually select Other from the drop down next to Select Service then fill out the Name and Service String and check Query Status.  Next you have to add them to the Profile to make them active.  Controller > mDNS > Profiles then choose the profile you want to add them to (mine is default-mdns-profile), select each from the Services List Service Name drop down and click Add for each one.

I hope this helps anyone else having this issue of adding Google/Nest Speakers and not being able to manage them from the Google Home app or create speaker groups within the google home app.