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Forum Discussion
Orbi RBR50 frequently losing connection
I've had the Orbi RBR50 for nearly 2 years with no issues. Just a couple days ago, however, it has suddenly started losing connection several times a day. The connection is fine when I connect my P...
The issue as I understand it is that the router stops resolving IP addresses (DNS service fails).
If there are connections that exist, they should continue since no new name resolution needs to happen.
I tried a couple things including changing the DNS setting from "Use These DNS Servers" (my original setting) to "Get Automatically from ISP" and this made things better for a few hours. Unfortunately the problem resurfaced with the changed setting - so it doesn't appear to be either setting.
I have also read that this started with the daylight savings time change - and this seems to correlate although I cannot think how that setting would *still* be causing the issue several days later. That being said, I did check the time zone and NTP settings (they were fine).
The best / simplest thing I can offer is to roll back to an older firmware version. The 2.7.2.104 seems to be the one experiencing the problem.
Today I rolled back to 2.7.2.102 and so far so good.
Caveat:
You may need to do a "factory reset" after applying the older firmware version. It may not happen every time, but I lost the ability to connect to the router after installing the old version and needed to push the tiny reset button and go through setting all my configurations again including WiFi name and password. (so either backup your configuration to a file or at least be ready to re-do the configuration).
I cannot say this permanently fixes the problem, but so far it has been ~12 hours and no issues.
I can say that if you have a mesh network (a router plus one or more satellites) that you do not need to change the firmware on the satellites - only on the router.
Good luck! Hopefully Netgear is working on a new version of firmware that does not have problems (Anyone? Netgear? Bueller? ...)
I dropped back to older firmware, 2.6.1.40, and I turned off the traffic meter function under advanced settings. It's been up 24 hours now without any random DNS problems.
I didn't notice before that Orbi at some point had switched from my set OpenDNS server addresses back to ISP provided DNS option, no idea how long ago that happened. I switched them back, but that obviously wasn't the DNS problem. It also appears that over time, the power levels option for 2.4 Gig changed and I hadn't noticed, they were back up to 100 percent, so had to drop it to 50 percent, I swear there used to be a 75 percent option in there.
I can't figure out why all the users had the issue right after the time change. I was on the latest firmware for quite a while with only some very slight very intermittent disconnection issues on only a couple devices happening.
I've had my RBR50 for over 4.5 years now, I haven't master reset it once, except while in various Netgear Beta projects, but those were years ago now.