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Orbi router solid magenta (not the satellite)
My Orbi router (not the satellite) stays solid magenta after rebooting. When I login to the router, every parameter looks OK. The router is in Access Point mode and has received an IP address from my...
If it makes you feel better than press the ap button but dont change anything then press the router button. Or vice versa depending on your setup.
Well once again, yesterday morning I awoke to find the Orbi base station solid magenta. My automatic network monitor had rebooted the modem and the router three times and that hadn't helped.
So here's a warning. I decided to call Netgear and had to use my phone to look up their number. Right at the top of the search results was listing called "Netgear Technical Support | 1-800893-1168" | Router | Wireless". In my hurry, I failed to notice that the associated URL wasn't netgear.com but some place called www.routersupport247.com. ** DO NOT CALL THIS NUMBER!! * It is a scam.
Their M.O. is to get you to open a remote desktop session. Then the guy opens a cmd window and gives a tree command. This lists your entire directory structure. While that's going on he's telling you he's "scanning your PC for malware". And then sure enough, at the very end pops up this line:
"C:\Documents and Settings\Owner> trojan found !! network error 17 devices".
So at this point it ought to be obvious what's going on. This "message" appears *after* the command prompt, and the cursor is sitting there blinking at the *end* of the line. So he just quickly pasted a pre-defined string with that text into the cmd window and says (do your best Bombay accent here) "Oh, you can see, you have a trojan!". In any case, "tree" isn't a malware scanner to begin with. That's where I accused him of being a scammer. He just hung up on me. The next step of course would be to get your credit card to pay for him to "remove" this (non-existent) trojan.
But the most annoying part is that during all this, the Orbi suddenly came back to life on its own. So now I had nothing to show the real Netgear support. I did notice though that now I'm now on firmware v. 1.12.0.18.
I think this whole magenta business has to do with f/w upgrades. I need to find a way to stop this. Automatically chopping your Internet access to do an upgrade is totally obnoxious anyway. What if I was in the middle of recording a movie on my DVR? Or doing something really important like trying to place a trade with my broker?
So before I get out the trusty Wireshark, does anyone happen to know the IP of the mothership the Orbi phones home to check for upgrades? We need to block that. *I'll* decide when to take an upgrade, thank you very much.