Support / Connecting / The secure address
Yardstick gives your machine a permanent web address so the page opens with a padlock and no browser warning, from your phone or any computer in the house. It is set up for you. It is also optional, and on some networks it will not work. Here is all of it.
Yardstick gives your machine a permanent web address so the page opens with a padlock and no browser warning, from your phone or any computer in the house. It is set up for you and needs nothing from you. If it does not work on your network, that is almost always your router blocking it, nothing on your machine is broken, and you can keep using Yardstick exactly as you were.
Every install gets its own permanent address that looks like this:
https://a1b2c3d4e5f6.box.yardstickhome.com:8478/That address belongs to your machine and nobody else's. Yardstick obtains a real certificate for it from a public certificate authority, which is why your browser shows a padlock instead of a warning. You will find yours in Settings → Access and login, with a button to copy it.
The address is public, but it resolves to your Yardstick's private address on your own network. Nobody outside your house can reach your machine through it. It is not remote access and it does not open anything to the internet.
Three reasons, in the order most people care about them.
192.168.1.50. That is a rule of the whole certificate system,
not a Yardstick limitation, which is why reaching your machine by its number always warns.localhost on the machine itself, but from a phone or
another computer they need the secure address.This is worth saying plainly, because it is easy to assume a padlock is compulsory.
Yardstick keeps everything on your own machine. Your recordings, your map and your settings
never leave it, and the pages you are looking at are served by your own computer over your own
network. Reaching it at http://localhost:8477 on the machine itself, or by its
address on your network from another device, is a perfectly reasonable way to run it, and plenty
of people will.
The secure address is a convenience. If it does not work on your network and you would rather not change anything, ignore it. You lose the padlock and, when it arrives, the camera from other devices. You lose nothing else.
Yardstick checks whether the device you are using can reach the address, and says so on the Settings page. If it reports that this device cannot, here is what is happening and what to do.
Your Yardstick is running and recording. The certificate is valid. What has failed is one convenience address, and only on the device in front of you. Other devices may well reach it, and phones often work when a computer does not.
This is the usual cause. Many routers refuse to answer for an internet address that points back into your own home network. It is a genuine security measure, called DNS rebinding protection, and it is switched on by default in a lot of equipment, including several ISP-supplied gateways. Other products that use the same approach, Plex among them, hit exactly this.
The tell is the wording of the error. If your browser says server not found or names a DNS problem, it never reached your machine at all, so the certificate is not involved. If instead it warns about the connection not being private, that is a different thing and you are probably using the address number rather than the secure name.
Any one of these fixes it. The first is best, because it keeps the protection switched on and fixes every device in the house at once.
box.yardstickhome.com to the allowed list.Get-NetAdapter -Physical | Where-Object {$_.Status -eq 'Up'} |
Set-DnsClientServerAddress -ServerAddresses 8.8.8.8,1.1.1.1
Clear-DnsClientCache-ResetServerAddresses in place of
the server list.After any of these, quit your browser completely and reopen it. Browsers keep their own record of failed lookups, separate from the rest of the machine, and will otherwise keep showing you the old failure.
If you have two routers, a mesh system behind an ISP gateway, or a guest network, your computer can end up on a different network from your Yardstick. Then no DNS change will help, because there is no route between them. The two need to be on the same network, which is often simply a matter of joining the same wifi your Yardstick is on.
You can check this. On the machine that is failing, compare the address your computer has with the one shown for your Yardstick. If the first three groups of numbers differ, they are on different networks.
If you tried the address before it was ready, your computer may have remembered that it did not exist and will keep saying so for a while even after it starts working. Clearing that is harmless:
Windows: ipconfig /flushdns
Mac: sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponderThen quit and reopen your browser.
None of this is needed to use Yardstick. It is here because people reasonably ask what their machine is doing.
We see that an install asked for a certificate, and the private network address its name should point at. We do not see your recordings, your map, your location, or anything you do in Yardstick, and we cannot reach your machine. Certificates last about three months and your machine renews its own before then, without asking you.
If you would rather your machine did not do any of this, switch off Trusted certificate
in Settings → Access and login. Your machine stops asking for a
certificate and stops reporting its address, and Yardstick falls back to a certificate it makes
itself. Everything keeps working; you will just get the browser warning on the secure page, and
reaching Yardstick over plain http is unaffected either way.
Still stuck after trying the above, or not sure which of these applies to your network? Open a support ticket and tell us what the browser says and what your setup looks like. Because Yardstick runs on your own machine, we can walk you through the exact setting.