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Forum Discussion
Share Your NETGEAR Armor Experience
Hello NETGEAR Armor Community!
Thank you to all who have activated your NETGEAR Armor trial and to those who have subscribed to our cyber security service. Since the launch of the service we h...
Christian_R I think I'm done - I think this experience has trashed my router and after 15 years of being on the Netgear team, buying and recommending your hardware, I can't handle this degree of trouble. I have a business to run and plenty of other things to do without having to go through the wringer with this router thanks to Armor.
I've been at the point now where any time I want to reboot the router, it will not generate an Internet connection without me having to perform a factory reset, walk through the entire setup with defaults, and then manually go back in and customize it.
I had to do that again today and it took me about an hour to do everything, whereupon I noticed where my router might be broken:
The day I finally got Armor removed, did a factory reset, and manually reconfigured everything, the Router's internal clock got stuck on that day and time. I only happened to notice it today, because I thought I'd look through the logs and I noticed only a handful of entries that stoped at September 18 2020, which was logged as the exact sime time on the router--the router's clock wasn't moving past that minute and I couldn't get it to sync time with another server like time.windows.com or time.nist.gov - the page would crash if I tried to apply changes.
It's very frustrating to try to re-do the router using the Nighthawk mobile app and have it say, "We'll activate Armor for you if you qualify for a trial", and offer me no way to say no...then when the setup fails, I have to go to the browser. While using the browser gives me the ability to opt out of Armor, I then get pop-up ads in the admin interface to buy your parental controls service, then to buy Armor, and I have to swat those down to be able to finish setting things up.
I can't tell if auto-updating the firmware is broken because of the clock issue, or if it's just broken in general, but I did manage to get the firmware updated. I also managed to re-route the NTP sync to time.nist.gov, and so far it looks like it's tracking, I also have a bunch of log entries from December 31, 1969, at 7PM and logging into the router's admin panel triggers this to be repeatedly entered in the logs:
[DoS attack: Fraggle Attack] from source 72.31.130.17,port 67 Sunday, Jan 03,2021 12:40:32
After zero help or response from Netgear, I returned my Orbi router to Costco and bought a different brand. I now have full time security that works (cheaper than the non working Armor by the way), no buffering, support I can call without additional fees, and internet speeds that match what I’m paying for. It’s been installed for 30 days and it just works. I will NEVER buy Netgear again, router or otherwise. I’d suggest anyone considering buying a Netgear product, buy it at Costco so you can return it, because you will definitely have buyer’s remorse. Nothing worse than a company selling a defective product that doesn’t perform as advertised and then refusing to give customers tech support unless they pay for it. If they would actually let customers ask questions, listen to their concerns (which might help them fix their issues with this router) and advise on how they intend to fix the obvious issues with this router, they might salvage some relationships. But Netgear, quite frankly, has shown they value money over customers. And when that happens, you better run as fast as you can away from a company.
I have a Orbi set but am not in a position tom change them. But would never buy Netgear again and indeed though on a smaller scale I had replace a network router so jumped to another maker this time. I have also advised a number of people in organisations and family to avoid them so there poor product and support does have a cost to them. Reviews and comments I have put on them and have been marked as useful a number of times. The old view that one customer poorly served can cost you multiple future sales is really true.
What was the brand/model of the router you switched to? I've only chose Netgear because of the Armor subscription--since I have a ton of IoT devices.What is the type of full time security you mentioned? Asking for a friend ...;)
Eero Pro 6, Eero+ security