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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...
I've had this router at least a year now, no issues, no "Armor" installed, I use the parental controls with Circle (First Generation) app. Works great. Love it.
About 5 or 6 days ago, we suddenly had issues with devices without internet, or hanging, or lagging. The router's internet signal indicates incoming internet is fine. This has never happened before. Before, if/ when the internet goes out, it's because our internet provider is hiccuping, and we see the red light on the router indicating this. Not this time; the light is white and reassurring and connections are blinking white as if data is passing along. So this was a new and annoying occurrence. Out of ideas, we turned off the router, waited, and turned it back on.
When it came back on, nothing worked. It seemed everything in the router had been reset - I had to log in from my computer to routerlogin.net or whatever, reset the Admin password to my prior password, re-enter the network SSID names I'd used before, set up passwords, the whole nine yards. Start from scratch. I also lost ALL my Circle information, but that might be unrelated.
That's the first time I noted this "Armor" stuff on my router. What is this Armor stuff? I wondered. Okay, whatever. I had no intention of signing up for the paid subscription but if it's not bothering me, fine.
Since then - I have had to recycle the power on the Netgear router no fewer than 6 times, due again to devices not connecting, or video being watched on a computer on YouTube hanging or lagging, etc. The router never "lost its brains" as it did the 1st time - but this situation is ANNOYING to say the least. I attribute this continued performance problem to the Armor thing, as it's the only thing different. Not only that, but I have been connecting my home router to safe DNS servers (with OpenDNS) for years now, and I suddenly noticed no traffic when I go to my OpenDNS dashboard these last 5-6 days. In the router settings, it no longer shows the family safe DNS servers anymore. When I tried to change them back to the Family Safe OpenDNS server domains again, it tells me I'm not allowed to do that - I have to disable parental controls first. What ?? since when ??
Finally today, after turning off / turning on the router AGAIN due to "no internet" problems -- I searched for this online and found the (not very intuitive) way to turn OFF Armor on my router. I turned it OFF and I will now see if I can connect my router back to these two "SAFE" DNS domains, and see if my internet issues in these recent past few days continue or disappear. I sure hope they disapppear. This has been completely unacceptable and hugely annoying. I work at home, I need my router to work reliably, which up until this past week, my Netgear Nighthawk has done.
Just a follow-up - since removing or disabling the "Armor" thingy from my netgear router, these issues of which I wrote (hanging, not communicating, having to cycle power on the router continually, etc.) were gone and have remained gone. Yay!