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Forum Discussion
Orbi firmware v2.1.1.16 discussion
do we need to do nvram wipe for this 2.1.1.16 Firmware just released today? noticed it downloaded automatically.
437 Replies
Update from testing here. Two satellites both WIRED through switch to router. Entire mesh is 2.1.1.16, but I manually downloaded the 2.1.1.16 satellite file from Netgear and re-installed over the existing file. (Figured earlier update might have gotten corrupted).
TESTING FROM EARLIER - saw a couple devices identifying to which satellite or router they were connected, but now 30 mins later, all 45 devices only show "Orbi Router" as their connection point under "attached devices".
For the devices connected DIRECTLY TO THE ROUTER, they show 2.4 or 5 and a wireless icon under "connection type". This is good.
All other devices, however, are showing Orbi Router as connection POINT but "wired" as connection TYPE. I have no idea to which satellite they're connected, thus can't determine the optimal placing of satellites for fixed devices (e.g. Chromecast connected to TV).
NEST CAMS: so far, so good. Under 2.1.1.16, no frequent disconnect like I used to go.
ROUTER: does not reboot but it's only been working about 12 hours.
The devices not showing to which satellite they are connected is a known issue and the forum moderators have stated that Netgear is working on a fix for next firmware release. 2.1.1.16 is relatively stable, but I did run into an issue after running about a week on it where some devices could not connect to internet through Wifi, even though they are connect to Wifi just fine and able to access LAN. The only thing that seemed to fix this was rebooting the router. I hope that this was just a one time occurance, or is because of some memory leak that will be fixed with next firmware and does not occur more than once a week.
Haha, since the FW update, my satellite thinks it's my Android Phone that I used to initially set things up (see attachment).
So, um, yeah, it's a satellite, not a phone
Mind you, I've done factory reset of both the router and the satellite since then and only set up with the web interface, yet some routing table or similar still has data embedded that tells the router/satellite that the RBS50 satellite is my LG V20 Phone in terms of name and graphic, but it identifies the product type correctly. I manually changed the name back to RBS50 before taking the screenshot.
What a half-baked POS effort from an otherwise great networking gear company...so disappointed in Netgear.
Yes, I'm having 4-6 internet drops a day from my RBR50 router under all FW patches.
About 11 hours ago, I reloaded 2.1.1.16. This time I used 'address reservation" for family sanity devices (tv, iPad, iPhone) and various iot devices and the satellites. The addresses used was below the unassigned DHCP range. since then, I haven't observed the satellites dropping off or doing the x.x.x.150 thing. Watched two Netflix movies and some YouTube videos with no issues. No disconnects with iPhone/iPad gaming. No kid telling me how the wifi is glitchy.
I didnt reserve addresses for the laptops and desktops. Those lost connection with a few saying IP address conflicts.
Its a roundabout way to say I suspect the dhcp server. I'll probably sing a different tune when the kid gets out of school in the afternoon.
I take it back. I'm going back to 2.0.0.74
Hi, I am from HK and brought the RBK53 0n 310/12/2017. It was on 2.0.0.74 out of the box and no auto-update was effected by the system.
Except for taking sometimes to set up wired backhaul, which was not supported in 2.0.0.74 but the salesman told me it was possible, the system has been working prefectly. I have been up for 2 days and 9 hours now. No reboot, no wifi dropping and with around 15 devices attached. I have DHCP enabled and 2 deviced with fixed ip (network printer and NAS for access by applications)
I have also downloaded the 2.1.1.16 but choose not to upgrade for the time being. Will see the development.
Shotround -- I also suspect the DHCP server. I was able to observe my AppleTV successfully connect to WiFi but then fail to obtain an IP address. The Apple device defaulted to the fake private IP they use after a timeout. So clearly, something prevented the DHCP server from issuing an address to the AppleTV.
I may try to reserve some addresses as well (although I am not touching anything for the moment as things seem to have calmed down). In response to the Orbi WiFi freaking out I immediately "wired" everything that was close to a hub. Now most of my high bandwidth stuff like media devices is off WiFI -- and that seems to be helping.
yesterday morning, 18 hours after I did the address reservation, communication between one of the satellites and router was out. I had a tv wired to the satellite. The kid's iPad was probably connected same satellite. I reset both as family wanted their morning internet fix.
Its about 27 hours since. Family hasn't complained. I did notice some lag time spikes up to 500ms with iPhone gaming (world of tanks), but no disconnect.
The other satellite is going strong. I haven't touched it since the other day, after flash to 2.1.1.16. It has nas and my computer wired to it.
I have 5ghz at 50% and 2.4ghz at 25%.
Lol. Well the honeymoon appears to be over. I cannot log into the web interface this morning. Keeps asking for the UID and password and says the connection to the site is not private. It's still routing and functioning normally, but I cannot do anything on the router page. I can log into the debug.htm page for the router, but not the main interface.
Interesting. After so many attempts, I get the attached error page.
orbirick wrote:
I can log into the debug.htm page for the router, but not the main interface.That is strange. However, I have noticed that whenever I log in to the debug.htm page first and then delete just "debug.htm" in my browser's address bar, I get returned to the main interface without having to log in again.
tagteam wrote:
orbirick wrote:
I can log into the debug.htm page for the router, but not the main interface.That is strange. However, I have noticed that whenever I log in to the debug.htm page first and then delete just "debug.htm" in my browser's address bar, I get returned to the main interface without having to log in again.
And now it’s letting me log into the web interface. Go figure.
I think it’s toying with me. Tempting me to return it. It better not push very hard. With all the problem reports, I feel like I’m just waiting for the ax to fall.
Has anyone explored the power settings for each band? Or are you guys leaving it at 100% all the time? If you changed it, why did you do so?
Nearly 3 days since I manually rebooted the system. I've not seen any spurious reboots or loss of connectivity since I installed the Orbi system about 10 days ago.
The minor nits have so far been limited to the bad data reporting as regards connected devices and the odd, one-off (hopefully) issue logging into the web interface yesterday. I've not had any more trouble with that.
Surely I can do something to make this thing go crazy! When I get a few minutes to spare, I'm gonna start playing with static IP assignments and unplugging the ethernet cables to the satellites so I can try out the wireless backhaul.
But what I probably really need to do is learn how to telnet into the router and disable the auto-update process before a new update is force fed to us (since I haven't had that experience yet). I assume that needs to be done to the router and both satellites?
First time doing the telnet thing so I downloaded PuTTY for my Win 10 PC. According to the instructions here:
https://community.netgear.com/t5/Orbi/Firmware-V1-12-0-18-Discussion/td-p/1320421/page/5
I should be seeing a different auto_upgrade flag. Instead of a '1', I see a '0', the one it should be changed to, per the instructions.
The auto_check_for_upgrade=1 shows the same as the instructions, so I'll change that. Other than that 1 change, is there anything else that needs to be done to stop the auto upgrades that are pushed out?
Edit: now that I think about it, it appears the auto upgrade feature is now disabled by default; the system only checks for an upgrade, but won't automatically perform the upgrade.
If that's true, then I'm going to leave the settings alone as I would like to be informed of an upgrade, but only do the upgrade when I choose to do so. Do I understand this correctly?
Edit: this is for one of the satellites. I'll check the router itself and post separately.
Following the instructions from the above linked thread, I easily brought up the router config page.. which looked a lot more like the instructions! I made changes to only 2 of the command lines. The first one (orbi_auto_upgrade=x) already had a number greater than 1, so I left it alone instead of changing it to zero.
So now I expect to be notified of an upgrade, but only do a manual upgrade at my leisure instead of having the update done for me.
RBR50 telnet info
When my system upgraded to 2.1.1.16, my android phone lost its ability to connect to the network. Only when I set my Secuirty Options to WPA-PSK [TKIP] + WPA2-PSK [AES] was I able to get my phone back on the network.
I would very much like to go back to the more secure approach requiring WPA2-PSK [AES] only. Since I had been working in that mode for a couple of months, I can only assume 2.1.1.16 introduced an issue.
Any ideas on what I can do, or an acknowledgement that Netgear is aware of the issue and working on it? Since I am new to netgear I would like to learn how I can report this issue to Netgear directly.
- That's very strange. My Android is running Oreo 8.0 and my router security is set to aes only. All our mobile clients from Android to iOS have no issues connecting.
It really seamed strange to me also. I am on Android 7.0 with no chance to upgrade.
The other Android phones in the house (one older, one newer) had no issues either.
In looking at my phone, I cannot find a way to change any connection security settings.
4+ days since I last rebooted. Everything stable, no issues other than the satellite/device reporting issue which the new beta apparently resolves. But I'm hesitant to try the beta since everything else is working so well!
I want to take some time to play with my setup when I have a few minutes. I'd like to unplug the ethernet cable from one or both satellites and test the wireless backhaul. If/when I do that, should the wireless backhaul immediately pickup the connection? Or will I need to powercycle the satellite and/or router?
And vice versa when I reconnect the wired connection? Do I need to do anything to force the wired/wireless connection if I switch back and forth?
I just noticed something odd. I cranked up Wifi Analyzer and was checking my signal outdoors and happened to notice the channels. Take a look at my settings and then see what Wifi Analyzer shows. The channels I set are not being used. Or they don't appear to be. I'm sitting about 5 ft from the RBR50 when I took the Wifi Analyzer screen shots.
5 GHz radio should be on channel 482.4 GHz radio should be on channel 1Channel settings in the RBR50
Following up to the above post about the band discrepancy, I cranked up Inssider on a laptop and did not see band assignment issues. The assigned bands showed up properly. I cannot reconcile the difference between WiFi analyzer on my android and Inssider on a laptop.
orbirick wrote:
Following up to the above post about the band discrepancy, I cranked up Inssider on a laptop and did not see band assignment issues. The assigned bands showed up properly. I cannot reconcile the difference between WiFi analyzer on my android and Inssider on a laptop.
Your Orbi is using a 40 MHz width on 2.4 GHz. You set it to Channel 1 and it uses 1 - 5, which extends just to the edge of channel 7.
Your Orbi is using an 80 MHz width on 5 GHz. No matter what channel you set in the GUI, Orbi will always use channels 36-48.
These channels are what's shown in the plot you posted, so everything is working properly, but the way Orbi uses channels is confusing compared to the choices in the GUI.
In the last hour I just had my network and internet access die. Hoping it was my ISP, I called them and they had no outages reported. So I ran an ethernet cable from the cable modem to my PC and bingo, I was back online, so I knew it wasn't the ISP but instead was the Orbi.
So I uplugged the power to the RBR50 for about 30 seconds, then plugged it back in, reconnected my network/internet cables and waited until the white light went out. No change, still no internet access.
I began to dig out my old wifi system and was preparing to put it back in place when I heard my PC chime from the next room indicting I recieved a message alert. Sure enough, the Orbi was back online. But it took at least 10-15 minutes for it to come back up.
Now I'm perplexed as to whether to keep it and keep trying or just pack it up and take it back to Costco.
Decisions, decisions.
