I have a homemade network monitoring system that uses a standard udp ping to ensure all the devices I care about are alive on my network. I recently installed the Ring Mailbox Monitor and the requisite Ring Bridge to connect the sensor to my network and the Internet.
I’d like to monitor the aliveness of the IP address DHCP has assigned to the bridge, but the Bridge never responds to a ping. A scan of the IP address that DHCP has assigned the ring bridge, shows no ports open; no surprise, since security is a major concern on this device.
The Bridge and Mailbox sensor are working flawlessly, but I’d be happier tickling the ping udp port of the bridge’s IP address to confirm its alive and well.
Thoughts and comments welcome
John Vaccaro
The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong -but that’s the way to bet. - Damon Runyon
Hi @jjvaccaro. I checked with my team on this, and they let me know that the Ring Bridge uses TCP rather than UDP, so make sure you are pinging the correct one. If you’re still unable to ping the Ring Bridge’s IP address, please give our support team a call at one of the numbers available here so they can assist further. If you are outside of the US, please visit here to see how to contact support.
@jjvaccaro@Caitlyn_Ring
I do exactly the same thing with my devices, keep a list of their local IPs in a batch file and run it occasionally to make sure they’re all working. The Ring Lighting/Mailbox bridge has never responded to the pings (although their doorbell and alarm base station always do).
I contacted support and received exactly the same answer, from the same person too I believe. I told her that her information was incorrect, as ping uses ICMP as the underlying protocol, not UDP or TCP. She confirmed this with someone in Development, it was “going to be looked into further” or some such, and that was the last I ever heard about it.
I suspect the answer is that their firmware developers just never bothered to implement ping replies, and they don’t care enough to implement it now and push out the firmware update after the fact.
I have the same problem. AND I contacted support. And they told me to buy a new bridge since mine was out of warranty. And I did and the new bridge wont respond to ping either. As @jjvaccaro said, its a firmware issue. Its upsetting as I use it for the mailbox sensor and it goes offline and I want my home automation to tell me that. But I need to ping it to check it!!! Every other device including the doorbells, the chimes, etc. all respond to the ping just fine.
And this is pinging internally so it should not matter for TCP or UDP forwarding.
Hi @macjeff. If you have a new Bridge and you are experiencing a similar concern as before, I would follow up with our support team. Since your new device is in warranty, the support agent should be able to get to the bottom of this for you.
