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Is my 13-month-old RBR50 bricked?
Last night we had a brief power outage - for a couple of seconds. I lost internet connectivity and expected things to come back as normal after everything rebooted. However - my RBR50 did not. ...
Well, after connecting to the internal serial console and fiddling around with the U-Boot loader for an hour I managed to unbrick my router and upload the latest RBR50-V2.7.1.60 firmware. Yay!!! :smileyvery-happy:
Serial port fun
The router had lost almost all of its configuration state - including it's MAC addresses, hardware id, model id, etc.
I needed to set these to back sensible values be able to bring up the TFTP loader and load/flash an image. (luckily the error message saying that the image file didn't macth the hardware ID told me what values I needed to configure!)
Then it took a couple of reboots to come up happy. Still had a bogus SSID and unknown passphrase (so the iPhone app was useless) - but at least I could log in on the LAN port and manually set thing up.
Now it seems to be happy I will see if I can find my configuration backup file ;-) (you know, the one you always make but have never tried restoring!)
Time for a beer!
Thanks for the suggesition.... I just tried all that again, uising the PSU from my satellite...
Same initial symptoms (no broadcast SSID, no DHCP response on wired ports);
neither the regular factory reset, nor the 30-30 harder reset worked.
The router powers up to a blinking white ring (one fllash every two seconds). Adter a minute or so this changes to a pulsing/throbbing white (once every 3s). It is broadcasting no SSID that I can see. After 5 minutes or so, the ring goes magenta. (This is at least expected -- it's not connected to my cable modem since I'm still using my backup wifi router for internet access)
The symptoms seem similar to other people's reports of failed firmware updates. But the behavior of the power LEDs seems normal - it's just the router doesn't respond on either the WIFI or wired interfaces.
The top ring indication is based on the WAN port connection, router or AP mode. Doesn't give inidiation of wifi problems.
No SSID name of ORBI### seen on any wireless device?
Sounds like the RBR is bad and needs replaced.
That is correct - there is no SSID with ORBIxxxx.
The router label says it should be ORBI77 ... I tried manually associating to that SSID using the password on the label but that didn't work.
There also doesn't appear to be any other SSID that comes and goes when the router is powered on and off.
I'm not sure whether I would expect to get a DCHP address assigned on the LAN ports in the factory reset state. (assuming at least one of those dozens of factory resets wiorked of course!)
Some small progress... I connected my laptop to the wired LAN port of the router and ran Wireshark. I noticed that after a few minutes the router started *sending* DHCP diiscover messages where the "Host Name" option 12 was set to "Invalid HW ID, use default Orbi"
This seems pretty strange to me? (maybe it's checking for another DHCP server on the same subnet... but that hostname is disturbing!)
So - I put my wired ethernet config back to DHCP and, for the first time in ages I got assigned a DHCP address ... on a 192.168.1.0/24 subnet iwth a router of 192.168.1.250 (not an IP address I've ever used!)
So.. I tried hitting that with a web browser. Got a login prompt. Tried the default netgear credentials of admin/password and got a very broken looking management page:Note the bogus hardware version string matching the DHCP messages! Also, the configured SSID is NETGEAR75 and the wireless access point is Off.
I poked around some of the missing menu options and found there was actually an invisible link to a firmware update page (http://192.168.1.250/fwUpdate.htm) .... again with missing button images/text.
Guessed which was the 'choose filename' box and got a file selection dialog.Selected a firmware image from my laptop, clicked what looked like 'Upload this' and got a "Please wait a moment" popup and my status bar showed "Upliading (15%)"
Then after a while I got the following error:404 Not Found
This server does not support the operation requested by your client.
and my web browser address bar showed: http://192.168.1.250/upgrade_check.cgi?/fwUpdateCheck.htm%20timestamp=81087512679
SOOOO CLOSE!Looks like it's trying to validate the image in some way and I don't know how to bypass that.
This is too expensive to just toss in the garbage, and I'm not prepared to throw good money after bad. Surely there is a firmware disaster recovery mechanism?
[Sorry, no idea why the images I uploaded in this post keep just showing up as triangles. They look fine when I edit the post, and then they disappear :-( ]
The RBR needs replacing. Check with NG if this is under warranty.
Good Luck.
It's not. They only have 12 months warranty and this is 13 months old. They won't even respond to email.
Hence they will not be getting any more money from me.