I moved to a new flat today, and after unpacking and general housekeeping, it was time to connect the Echo to the network.  Unfortunately, it refused to play ball.

So I reset it to factory defaults. No luck. The process was hanging when it tried to connect to the net. The progress bar stopped at some point after being halfway through. Factory defaults again. No luck. But the old mother of all evil came into mind:

Everything is a DNS problem.

Could it be so? Of course it could. I am running dnscrypt-proxy so my DNS server is always set to 127.0.0.1 and not whatever the DHCP proxy serves. So, let’s get the default from the network:

networksetup -setdnsservers Wi-Fi empty

I then pointed my browser to alexa.amazon.com (yes I am not using the app) and the configuration completed without a hassle! I switched back to using OpenDNS FamilyShield by:

networksetup -setdnsservers Wi-Fi 127.0.0.1

For anyone interested I brew install dnscrypt-proxy and my dnscrypt-proxy.conf has:

ResolverName cisco-familyshield