RBR50 no longer finds orbilogin.com after "https only" option is selected

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rmversluis wrote:

Netgear owns the orbilogin.com domain, does it not?

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No, they do not.  At one time, Netgear registered a bunch of internet domains (routerlogin.com, routerlogin.net, orbilogin.com, orbilogin.net... and maybe more)  When the registration expired, Netgear did not renew it.  (Maybe the certificate authority said, "what the hell?  There are 10's of thousands of devices around the world claiming that this Netgear certificate belongs to them, not Netgear.  This is not right.)  The end result was that Netgear no longer has claim to those URLs and has put a Self-signed SSL certificate in their products.

So now customers are screwed two ways by modern web browsers:

1. If they open a web browser http://orbilogin.com  to the web browser says, "UNSAFE.  Not secure.  Go Back."  Many web browsers have an option to ignore this warning and open the web site. (This is what I do.) Those browsers usually remember this directive and not longer complain.  Some of the latest browsers simply refuse to open the web site.
2. If they open a web browser to https://orbilogin.com , the web browser says, "UNSAFE.  Not secure.  Self-Signed SSL Certificate.  Go Back." Once again, some web browsers can be told to "go on, Dumbo" and some browsers simply refuse to cooperate.

So, users can be screwed no matter what they do.

Of course, when a user does a DNS query for "what is the IP address belonging to orbilogin.com, that query never leaves the Orbi router.  The Orbi DNS process intercepts the DNS query and returns the IP of the Orbi router LAN port.  (How would OpenDNS know which of the 10's of thousands of router around the world is the one this DNS query is looking for?)

Another way modern browsers attempt to protect users is by using their own encrypted process to perform DNS queries.  Hey, an unencrypted DNS query to OpenDNS, CloudFlare, GoogleDNS, etc. could be intercepted and "Big Brother" would know that you were looking for the IP of amazingsex.com (or whatever).  Can't have that!  So, instead of sending the DNS query, they send an encrypted request that the Orbi router never sees.

The most obvious way to open the Orbi https web interface is to open a web page to the IP address of the Orbi router.  It is usually 192.168.1.1 or 10.0.0.1.  But, during setup, the user could have set it to anything.  Also, if the Orbi is in Access Point (AP) mode, the IP would be set by the primary DHCP server.

The next thing is to try different browsers to get one that does not do such a good job of protecting the user.

If absolutely nothing else works, then the only way to guarantee access to the Orbi router is to perform a Factory Reset, which will erase all configuration settings, including the "Use only https" option