Petnet is reported to have shut down in 2023, but I couldn’t pin down an exact date, so I’m marking that unverified. Whenever it happened, the SmartFeeder V2 was left calling a server that stopped answering, which took the app, schedules and remote feeding with it.
FeederNet is a community server that stands in for Petnet’s, but the feeder has no setting for pointing itself at a different one. It’s hardcoded to two hostnames, so the only way to redirect it is to change what DNS server your whole house uses, not just the feeder. That’s the real cost of this fix: it’s a router setting, and it affects every device on your network’s lookups, not only the feeder.
What to do
- Read the FeederNet wiki and set up your own copy of the server.
- Point your router’s DNS setting at that server’s address, or run your own DNS resolver on the network and set your router to use it.
- Power cycle the feeder so it picks up the new DNS answer and reconnects.
If your router won’t let you change its DNS server, you’ll need a small always-on computer to run a resolver in its place. That’s the hard part. There’s no way around it short of opening up the feeder itself, which nobody’s done yet.