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Terrible Bug - Adding a RBS20 satellite to RBK 50 system breaks the LAN
Following up from another thread- I just got done with a full troubleshoot and it appears that Interoperability between Orbi systems is rather badly broken. Many users may not even notice this as th...
Also, Netgear provides 90 days of free telephone support for new purchases. Since the RBS20 is "new" from Amazon, have you tried calliing Netgear?
I called up support - They have taken down the case details and have forwarded it to L2 support.
Let's see if something comes out of it.
On a side note, it's not been more than 24 hours and everything is running stable (with Fast Roaming Off)
Whatever the issue it, It is most certainly related to the Fast Roaming flag
Nice find. Would be interested to know if NG fixes this for you and what results are.
The problem started again after running stable for a day
Enabling FR breaks LAN-LAN communication between satellites almost immediately
Disabling and rebooting gets it working but only for some time
This is most certainly not an isolated issue and many others have reported it on the RBS20
https://community.netgear.com/t5/Orbi/Orbi-RBK23-LAN-Connections-Fail-Cross-Satelites/td-p/1693135
A bad LAN should have been a very high priority bug fix for Netgear but I guess they just aren't bothered as LAN-LAN is not very important for majority of users
Something to submit a support ticket for and submit your debug logs too.
Something that some users haven't seen however don't have this same configuration. Possible there is a problem with the RBS20 being introduced.
Haven’t heard back from L2 support as yet but it's holiday season in India at the moment.
In the interim, I downgraded RBS20 to 2.0.0.64 which made things a little more stable but not completely.
With the assumption that the issue has something to do with a bug pertaining to STP, i have borrowed a dumb gigabit switch and swapped it out for my SG108e.
After putting that in, it appears that (at least for now), all devices on all satellites/wired/router can see each other.
Will post back in a few days to see if this runs stable
Couple of more updates and findings.
The network broke again because the satellite auto upgraded itself (even though I had blocked all services to the RBS20 IP address)
So did it the hard way - Reconfigured everything to go back to old topology of Orbi as AP and Edgerouter - X as router
Blocked Internet access to all 3 Orbi devices (so that they can't do this silly auto update business)
Downgraded all 3 to 2.1.4.16
Seems to be stable for now - Only time will tell
PS: One odd finding:
I decided to run a program called arpwatch on a connected linux machine to see if i can find something that's causing this issue
Am not sure if it's related but the RBS50 keeps sending a bogus ARP flood of 192.168.1.250 every few seconds
Oct 29 18:14:53 mint arpwatch: bogon 192.168.1.250 8c:3b:xx:xx:xx:xx ens18
Oct 29 18:14:53 mint arpwatch: message repeated 20 times: [ bogon 192.168.1.250(The MAC above is of the RBS50 which has a static IP of 192.168.5.13)
This is also referenced here - https://community.netgear.com/t5/Orbi/RBR50-amp-RBS50s-disconnect-from-Android-phones-amp-tablets/m-p/1444107/highlight/true
My nework is on 192.168.5.0/24 so the RBS20 has no business doing this
On a related note, can't feel but amazed as to why would Netgear use such a ridiculously bad firmware and coding practices on hardware that has so much potential
Just an update that everything is stable and working fine now .
Orbi is in AP mode and all Orbis are on 2.1.4.16
