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Forum Discussion
BR500 VPN Currently Experiencing Intermittent Connectivity Issues - Reply Thread
Update Oct 30, 2019
Dear NETGEAR BR500 customers,
Over the past two weeks we have experienced extreme instability with our VPN cloud ecosystem. We believe it is due to the scale of custo...
At 250/hr, Professional Engineer, I'm going to guess I've spent $25K-50K in time messing with these things.
This morning, I deleted the VPN again. I then tried an IPSEC VPN. I was finally able to get the IPSEC to connect, but I'm still stuck with no actual access. BTW - to get them to connectec, after deleting the Insight VPN, requires rebooting the routers.
Disabled the IPSEC conection at both ends, and rebooted.
Created a new Insight VPN group with a NEW name, different. Then added my routers back in. And we are working as of 8:40 AM US CDT.
Again, for how long...I'll post again if it goes down.
NETGEAR: Question: If deleting the VPN Group & then making a new VPN group works, I would think this could mean that the data in the VPN group on the Insight server is becoming corrupted. Might want to check that area.
I have done the breakdown and rebuild of the VPN in the past. I typically try that as a last resort now. It seems that if the clients are not connecting at all, all I typically do is to reboot the BR500 and see if it shows the bounce on Insight. If it does, then I know the BR500 is connected to Insight, then I test the clients again, if they connect, I test the tunnel, the problem is that we do not know how long the tunnel will stay up. If that does not work, I have found that there is usually an issue on the backend.
This last issue, I have found a few things odd, the VPN clients are showing connected, and will even show the remote subnet, but there is no traffic crossing, to add to that when I connect to the device on site I see a message about the device not being able to connect to the Insight service. This makes me wonder if the subnet info is cached somewhere on Netgears servers, or if there is a routing/capacity issue.
The other item is that the proxy options seem to disappear. I lost connectivity last night and was able to login and then repoint to another proxy, after that I logged the clients off and back in again and they were back up.
This is super frustrating, not only for me, but also for my clients, which will not be shutting down during everything that is going on.
I delted and then rebuilt the group and I'm back up. The VPN is working. The VPN light on the router is lit.
This is the router webpage. VPN light not lit AND it reports it cannot Access the Insight VPN
I have OpenVPN working for a client computer connection. It doesn't give me a two-way tunnel, but it gives me part of what I need.
Netgear, please don't try to improve the OpenVPN option for the BR500, because it works as it is now.
Are you kidding me???
Down AGAIN?
This INSIGHT VPN has an uptime of about 77%. Period.
Reboot - Reboot - Reboot
Rebooted twice last night to restore the Insight VPN. By 2AM local, the VPN was down again. 545 REBOOT and it is restored.
Now I have to go manually trigger all of the "automatic" backups that were supposed to run overnight.
BretD - Where is our daily update?
NETGEAR - When will you FIX THESE THINGS?
Netgear -
Please explain why the Insight VPN keeps failing, and what you are doing to stop it from regularly failing. Thank you.
Hello,
Spoke to engineering and they were able to determine the root cause of the VPN issue. They have been rolling out a schedule to reduce the need to bring down the servers for maintenance as well as configuration changes on the server. This will be noticeable over the next few days as more of the proxy nodes will be updated with the changes.
We have been putting up with the for 6 months. What was the problem and the fix?
Also, the Insight VPN is not "Fully Fixed", or at least the firmware still has issues.
My Insight VPN is up. I can use the Insight App and the Insight Webpage to look at the VPN service. If I log into the Router, it says the VPN is not avaiable and there is no VPN group. It is connected and working, yet the Router reports it doesn't exist. I'll post picture later.
After dealing with the VPN issues for over a year we have been forced to go to other firewalls. These BR500s have potential but we cannot have constant downtime with the tunnels between offices. The generic answers of reboot firewall or manually connect and change the VPN proxy is not a solution - it works maybe 1 out of 10 attempts.
We wasted so much $ on these devices between constant downtime for our branch offices, remote users, cost of devices, subscription costs, and IT time in babysitting these. These devices and the Insight VPN solutions are not ready for production use - Beta at best.
Best of luck to everyone with these going forward.Router Insight VPN pageLocal application
and again the vpn client is down. site to site works but my customers can't connect to the network via vpn client.
The VPN connection went down AGAIN overnight. Yes, rebooting "fixed" it. But this is CRAZY. Constantly rebooting these devices so they will communicate is ridiculous.
Hi,
BR500 is down again and again.
Today, Secure Diagnostic Mode is down too.
I can not choose a server in the list, so i can't connect by myself...
Technical support is out of order because CORONAVIRUS.
I'm in France and I have 3 BR500 => users can't work...
BR500 is a bad product since the beginning
Bred D: VPN servers are NOT opérationnal and it is NOT normal.
here again everything down again. nothing goes. again. although, you have to count when you can. it's easier. i doubt netgear will be able to do it. maybe after the crisis. only then the subscribers are gone.
Francis78,
Thanks for the update. In regards to SDM not generating a port number. I am discussing this with engineering, do you have a support case already opened regarding this issue or the VPN issues?
The BR500s went down again overnight, preventing some of our backup systems from operating. This is generally when we notice the overnight VPN shutdown.
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