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Forum Discussion
RBR50 / RBS50 intermittent routing problem
I've had my Orbi setup for about 10 months and, with exception of it being a nightmare to setup (it doesn't play well with Sonos), it's worked fairly reliably. Over the first 8-9 months It needed a r...
There's no correlation with power outages and I've no way to replicate the problem at the moment, it seems to happen at random.
It may be a 'creative' solution to attach the server to a satelite rather than the router but given the location of the server and the fixed placement of my WAN modem by my ISP I have no choice. This config has worked almost flawlessly for 9 months and continues to work 90% of the time even now. I see no reason why it shouldn't work either.
I'm aware of how DHCP is meant to work, maybe I should be more specific and clarify that:
1) In the cases a client doesn't get a DHCP address while connected to RBR50, if I give it a static address in the OS and try to ping the IP of either RBS50A, the server or any other device connected to RBS50A I receive no reply. If I ping RBS50B or any WAN IP address I receive responses as expected, hence this is only an issue routing traffic to RBS50A. An initial DHCP request may be a broadcast packet in itself but the complete handshake and allocation of an address does involve the use of routing protocols.
2) Sometimes the problem occures when my client device already has an IP address leased and I experience problems as I have lost connectivity to my DNS server i.e as above while connected to RBR50 and I try to ping the IP of either RBS50A or the server I receive no reply. If I ping RBS50B or any WAN IP address I receive responses as expected
That DHCP implementation does seem a little odd but as I'm not seeing any evidence of IP address conflicts I don't see that as being the cause of the problem.
What happens when RBS50A and RBS50B are switched?
(does the problem go with the satellite?)
Is it always the same device or does this happen randomly to many devices?
I hadn't tried switching the satellites but have just done so for confirmation. However, as I highly suspect it's an issue with the router rather than the satellite, I'm imaginig the problem is likely to return within a day or two.
As for 'is it always the same device' - when it happens, the problem effects every client device on my LAN and it impacts their ability to reach either RBS50A or the devices attached to it. However, it's only really the inability to reach the server providing DHCP and DNS for my LAN (attached to RBS50A) that really causes any grief. Strangely, devices attached to RBS50A can still reach the other devices connected to RBS50A and route outwards to the WAN so these experience no problems whenever devices connected to RBS50B or RBR50 are essentially rendered offline by virtue of not being able to reach their DNS server.
I've now tried switching the sattelites around and it didn't even last 12hrs before one device that was previously working fine suddenly lost connectivity through to my DNS server so it's looking like it is either a router hardware or config issue.
Unless anyone's got any suggestions on where to find some decent logging to do some proper troubleshooting on these things rather than just blindly disabling functions it looks like my next step is factory reset and reconfigure then ship it back as faulty if it still doesn't work.
An update for anyone who may care - I've since disabled the DHCP service on the Orbi and (touch wood!) the Orbi and all devices attached to the mesh appear to be behaving themselves since.
The disadvantage of doing this is that whereas previously I could power on my Orbi router, satellites or server in any order I chose as I could rely on either the router or server giving the required DHCP addresses to my satellites, I now have to be careful to always power on the server first (to enable DHCP), then the router (has a static IP), then the two satellites (can now connect to the router and get a DHCP address from the server) to get everything back online properly.
IF this has solved the problem permanently I'm not convinced I fully understand why it would do. One thing that did surprise me is that the satellite that's attached to the server shows as being connected to both my Orbi router (via wireless) and my server (wired) using the same (virtual?) MAC address. With that in mind I'm guessing there's something odd going on with the Orbi router's routing tables if/when the satellite first gets it's DHCP address from the router but then later receives a DHCP renewal approval from the server...maybe?