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BR500 Rebooting Itself
I've noticed that my BR500 occasionally reboots itself. Has anyone else noticed this? It started doing this after I did the following (not sure which, if any, contributed): upgraded firmware to ...
[Sorry to cross-post, but I made the error of splitting and overlaping my problems across two different threads here, and I want to accept this as my solution to both].
Just an FYI to anyone else who experiences any of this: I have disconnected my BR500 from the Insight service, rebooted the router, and the VPN messages have stopped (obviously!), the "NAT loopback" is allowing my LAN to reliably take advantage of port forwarding (sub-second connection again, before was either hanging or taking 10+ seconds to connect), and my router has stopped randomly rebooting itself. Also, I am no longer seeing the sporadic high-CPU (sporadically 30 - 60+ percent) on the BR500.
Of course I no longer have any VPN (as ports 12973 (TUN) and 12974 (TAP) hang, even when the Open VPN service is enabled, which is the only reason why I enabled Insight + Instant VPN). But having a stable, reliable, working router is much more important to me.
Another user on this forum shared that Netgear had suggested disconnecting from Insight as a possible solution to the random reboots, which is why I am sharing this, in the hope that it may help others.
No promises, your milage may vary, void where prohibited by law, etc., but for anyone who is at their wits end and frustrated with the BR500, as I was, this maybe a possible solution to regain stability if you can live without the Insight service.
UPDATE: Filed a support ticket to start a paper trail. Tech said they had one other case of this on file and it was from a previous firmware version. Solution for now is to remove the device from Insight and see what happens from there.
Of course, removing a device from a service it's named after to fix a serious issue doesn't say much good about the device or service.
Actually, I started having the reboot problem right after I signed up for the Insight service service for $$$ and purchased a VPN license for $$$. I would love to remove my router from Insight, but I can't figure out how? When I login to Insight, I see the account status is 'Active', but when I click on My Devices I just get options for upgrading my subscrition or buying device credits.
I also have a message every minute showing up in my logs that I think is related to this: '[VPN] vppnctl: vpn enabled', as I have OpenVPN turned off and have not configured IPSec.
Any ideas on how to remove my device from Insight? I only added it because I could not get OpenVPN working, and never wanted Insight to begin with.
Never mind ... I *think* the problem was that I had previously (back in April?) purchased VPN for $$$ but just signed up for Insight Trial ... so I just seleced Insight Trial, and was able to see my device, and then remove it from Insight. Fingers crossed hopefully this will help.
I also am no longer getting a 'VPN connected' message in the logs every minute.
I do have a problem where by sometimes my port forwards are being delayed (10 - 20 seconds) or blocked entirely from my LAN. This was supposedly fixed in the 5.6.0.1 firmware:
- Fixes the issue where the NAT loopback was blocked by firewall. This release allows the NAT loopback to go through the firewall.
and I thought was working reliably until recently, but now I'm having sporadic problems with it (it always works relaibly from the WAN, and connects sub-second from the WAN across about 6 forwarded ports, but from my LAN, it sometimes connects immediately, and sometimes is delayed 10-20 seconds, and sometimes never connects).
dfilip wrote:Never mind ... I *think* the problem was that I had previously (back in April?) purchased VPN for $$$ but just signed up for Insight Trial ... so I just seleced Insight Trial, and was able to see my device, and then remove it from Insight. Fingers crossed hopefully this will help.
I also am no longer getting a 'VPN connected' message in the logs every minute.
I do have a problem where by sometimes my port forwards are being delayed (10 - 20 seconds) or blocked entirely from my LAN. This was supposedly fixed in the 5.6.0.1 firmware:
- Fixes the issue where the NAT loopback was blocked by firewall. This release allows the NAT loopback to go through the firewall.
and I thought was working reliably until recently, but now I'm having sporadic problems with it (it always works relaibly from the WAN, and connects sub-second from the WAN across about 6 forwarded ports, but from my LAN, it sometimes connects immediately, and sometimes is delayed 10-20 seconds, and sometimes never connects).
Use UPnP for port forwarding if you can. Thankfully that's one thing Netgear is generally very good at implementing. I was getting the "VPN connected" log entry too, which made 0 sense since no VPN was active at the time. Unless Insight works by silently using a VPN to connect to the router, which would be astoundingly bad engineering.
In regards to the port forwarding being delayed. Is it certain hosts on the lan that are getting delayed/rejected? Or is it any hosts you are attempting to connect to? Are you able to get a packet capture from wan to lan so we can see what happens when an outside connection is trying to connect to a host on the lan?
It was any hosts ... and ports ... but only when connecting from the LAN to the BR500 external IP, whereas from the WAN to the BR500 external IP worked fine.
But I think now all is good again ... everything seems to be working again with "NAT loopback", such that I can reliably connect to all of the ports and all of the hosts that I have port forwarding on.
I removed the BR500 from my Insight account, the once-per-minute VPN messages have stopped, the LAN port forwarding seems to be working again, and so far no random reboots or high CPU usage ... fingers crossed! ;-)
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