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Forum Discussion
Android 8 Crashes Orbi
I've been tracking down an issue where my Orbi just suddenly drops wifi and reboots. I've isolated it to be associated with an Android device running 8.0 or higher. And I've proven it turning off w...
I worked with Netgear 2nd level support for over an hour. They semi believe me what I was telling them and I mentioned this thread many times. They wanted debug logs from both the router and satelite before and after the reboots. They enabled the Start Debug Log Capture when boot up option and started a packet capture from the debug.htm page. They wanted me to connect my phones which I did. I haven't been able to get the router to restart since. Its going on 20+ hours with the debug capture going. I have no idea if this extra load on the units is preventing the issues, but I wanted to pass it along in case anyone else wanted to try it as well.
lprzybylski - I don't think you can recreate it just like that. It happens after a long sleep on my phone, generally in the morning, or if I am busy with work and I don't touch my phone for a few hours. I've had uptime of around 5 hours today after it disconnnected once at 3am and again at around 9:30am today. I know about the 3am because my wifi devices nag me via email or the app when they don't have internet.
But that's discourating...to think they don't believe you or worse...haven't though of that as a posibility. Sure, the phone connection could trigger something else which is causing the reboot, but it does happen. Enough people have reported it. I started troubleshooting settings on my phone like turning off wifi calling. My 2.4 GHz phones don't affect the Orbi the same way.
- Oh yes you can. My Orbi has literally rebooted over 20 times today prior to taking both our Pixel phones off wifi. It only needs about 10-15 minutes of snoozing. Then bam. A reboot as soon as the phone wakes up.
You lucky it only reboots every couple of hours. Before I took my phones off the WiFi, I could make the router reset on every connection to the WiFi from either of the two phones that are being affected. So since this packet capture change, and fully utilizing each of the phones again for over 20 hours, it's been great. Try what I did or don't, I just wanted to share it out because so many people are being affected and we can't count on Netgear to solve it anytime soon. My thing isn't a solution, it's a bandaid to get people working.
Another solution, if you have an old router, would be to set it up as an access point connected to the Orbi's network. Then connect the affected phones to it. I was experimenting with this before I worked with Netgear and had some good results. This solution isn't in place now that we were trying to make the router reboot.- I turned my logging on one night and that didn't fix it. Here is the panic log. Not sure if this is helpful to anyone or if it kosher to post this. But it is attached.
Let me know if it doesn't work. I got it into a PDF somehow from my phone. My Orbi is in access mode with an Asus RT-AC68U serving as the router. This has been my config for the past year. I had no trouble whatsoever until earlier this month.
I have also observed that the router/sats reboot when my phone or my wife's connect or disconnect to the wireless network. (both Pixel 2 XL on 8.1. Hers seemed to not cause the problem until she updated to 8.1, which also has Dec security patch). I removed the Orbi wireless network from our phones and turned the 5Ghz band on again for the Asus router. I had our two phones connecting the the Asus. Still had the disconnection issues at the same frequency.
- I figure with other routers that the disconnections still happen. But does the Asus router actually reboot? My gut feeling is the December security patch broke this. Unfortunately for me, my Orbi is new and I have no "before" test as my phone was already on the December security patch when Orbi was installed. I have a sneaky suspicion that Google will fix the wifi issue in the January security update. But I'm still in my return window and can't risk it. I am about to change back to my R7000.