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Forum Discussion
Orbi in Router mode continues to stop outgoing WAN connections
So i've had my Orbi RBK23 kit for sometime now, but from the beginning I have been using it in AP mode while being connected to my Fios Quantium Router. Things were going ok but I realize in AP mode...
evilhomerclone wrote:What just doesn't make anysense is that if this was having a DHCP problem at the WAN connection, why can the outside world get to my device??? My guess, and it is only a guess, is that the Orbi has asked to renew the IP lease and the ISP believes that the lease has been renewed, but the Orbi does not. As far as the ISP is concerned, traffic to that IP is still good. But, the Orbi has decided that it has to stop until it gets permission to speak. Clicking on "Test" appears to start an IP lease process that "works".
I know about the debug.html pages but trying to build a log and view it leaves me in a world of stuff I just dont have any understanding, so many different files are apart of the debug.log zip. Is there a specific file I need to focus on? The relevant file is WAN, which is a record of every packet into and out of the WAN interface.
As another form of troubleshooting, I have disabled today the Circle parental controls to see if that resolves it. I'm going to be annoyed if it does as putting my device in Router mode was soley done to access these features and going back to my inital post, I am starting to wonder why things started to go "crazy" on my end once the inital trial periods for both the Netgear Armor and Disney Circle Prem expired....
Oh and for the Lease thing, I just did what you suggested and the lease expires every 2 hours. So i know for sure I go longer than 2 hours before having problems. If this process failed every time, your connection would cease every two hours. But, apparently it doesn't fail consistently.
This appears to be a rare situation. It has never happened to me, and there have been only 2-3 users to report symptoms similar to yours. And, I have no idea how to interest Netgear engineers in the problem.
Try disabeling Circle and/or App Armour and the issue will go away.
Now both of these was the reason I bought the Orbi in the first place, but I prefer to have a working network over the ability to contol the kids.
Debugging didn't provide enough information for me to figure out exactly why there was issues with Circle and App Armour, but it could have had something to do with the cpu usage on the router (I could see CPU spikes around the time when the router went into internet lockdown).
When testing, I tried factory resets only enabling either circle or app armor, and both made the router go into lockdown. For some reason, Circle did this faster and more often than just App armour.
I gave up on both Circle and App armour and have a fairly stable network now. I've had issues like network drops happinging only twice the last 6 month, so there are still some issues with the Netgear software also.
I know it's related to the netgear software, because my old Asus AC68U is not having any issues with the fibre network at all (I put them both up connected to the fibe to check for network disruptions and only the Orbi got them for some reasons).
Lastly, the "Test" button also fixed my issues when they happened, these were my observations when the issue happened:
When not pressing the test button, the internet part of the router was blocked for 2-10 minutes before coming back up. When just waiting, the router kept the public IP.
When the "Test" button was pressed, the internet blocking was off after a few seconds and the router came up with a new public ip, meaning that the router probably just refreshed DHCP to test conectivity. I'm also guessing that services like Circle and App Armor restarted when they discovered an IP change and in that way, the internet connectivity was fixed.
I wanted to give it a good month to make sure things were on the up and up and they are. Sadly disabling the feature that I was really interested in seems to have stabilized my network connections. (Circle App)
I've also learned that Netgear seems to have removed the firmware i'm on from the support page. I have firmware v2.3.5.36 installed and it looks like Netgear is only showing firmware 2.3.5.30. Not sure at this stage if I should downgrade and try again or wait ot see if they release an updated firmware.
Majorly disasspointed and updated my Amazon review for this product.
-dave
You're not alone with this issue. Many of us also hit the same issue. The good news is that NG is currently working on a fix. The bad news is that we don't have an ETA from NG when it's going to be fixed. Check out Orbi-RBR50-Circle-frequent-DNS-failures for more details.
+1, loosing connection to Fios via ONT, at DHCP renewal. Orbi worked great until recently when we enable Circle, but didn't connect the dots as it was intermittent. It was painful to troubleshoot till I found this thread. Anyways, I just disabled my Circle (went to OpenDNS for now, less granular but still something). Hoping NG will fix this issue because we found Circle very helpful. Needless to say, their Tier 1 customer service refuses to help, so hoping someone in Tier 2/3 is listening!
