Whitelist Sites

[jshannon]

I have Google Nest wifi at home - the standard off the shelf version.  It is a mesh system.  I have one piece of exercise equipment in the house that refuses to connect to it and constantly has connectivity issues (always buffering).  The manufacturer is telling me that it is because the modem is blocking sites the equipment needs to access and that I need to whitelist the sites.  Is this even possible and if so how?  The equipment works no problems when hot spotting, but is not compatible to to our home wifi network.  The speed is not an issue where it is located (always at about 50mbps) and the tv next to the exercise equipment streams Foxtel, Netflix etc and is never an issue.  It is literally this one piece of equipment that is through iFit. Is there anything that can be done?  I have even had an IT consultant out who had no idea!  Thanks Justin.

[David_K]

Nest Wifi itself does not block any websites, which makes me think there's something strange going on here.

What brand and model is the device? Do they documentation which references what they spoke about?

[jshannon]

Thanks David. It’s a treadmill that uses the iFit app which is a heap of pre programmed fitness workouts. iFit are trying to tell me there is a firewall blocking the main server (cdn.ifit.com) and the following sites should be whitelisted on my WiFi/Firewall:

google.com

gateway.ifit.com

ifit-wolf.s3-cdn.ifit.com

cdn.ifit.com

app.launchdarkly.com

[jshannon]

And the brand/model is Nordic Track Pro Form Trainer 14 Elliptical.

[David_K]

I have Nest Wifi Pro and can browse to all of those domains in a web browser, including cdn.ifit.com without issue. I'm assuming you can too?

[jshannon]

What do you see on the screen when you browse cdn.ifit.com? The Google and launchdarkly sites are fine, but with the wolf.s3 site I get “access denied”, with gateway.ifit.com I get “message” “forbidden” and with cdn.ifit.com I just see a blank screen (all using my iPhone connected to the wifi to browse).

[David_K]

I get the same. My point is Nest Wifi isn't blocking access because if it was you wouldn't get any message at all, the browser would give you a network error instead.

[jshannon]

Thanks David. It still doesn’t work though - but works perfectly when I hot spot. So clearly still an issue between the machine and the network somewhere 🤦‍♂️

[David_K]

Unfortunately, some poorly designed devices like this don't seem to handle Wi-Fi networks which use the same network name for all the Wi-Fi bands (2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, 6 GHz) very well. Typically, the most common workaround for this is to add a 2.4 GHz only access point to your setup, perhaps repurposing an old router just for this purpose. Alternatively, if this is critical to you, you would need to consider a different Wi-Fi solution than Nest Wifi as unfortunately Google haven't made any announcements or feature changes to make working with these poorly designed 2.4 GHz only devices easier.

More reports for the specific product you have:
How to set up 2.4GHz access point alongside Google Nest Wifi mesh : GoogleWiFi

[jshannon]

Thanks for your help David.