XR500 drops internet

CeeDaRula Appears you don't understand that you talk to community members here, not to Netgear. Testing the router on a different site, probably with a different ISP and other requirements can be a valid test procedure. FURRYe38 made it clear in the sentence just before this proposal and suggested to contect Netgear support.

Yes, my suggestion what purely troubleshooting to see if the problem followed. If it does then you'll know the XR500 is probably bad and needs to be RMAd. Reason for telling you to contact NG support anyways. Please don't read my suggestion as being anything nefarious. 

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CeeDaRula wrote:

"Do you have a friend or family member that you could loan the router to, and see if the problem happens for them? "

1) you have to be joking to ask that

2) This would mean he would not have Internet for what could be a few hours to a day since it doesn't happen right away

3) Word of mouth is a companies best advertisement or worst enemy, bringing a product that a person is having issues with to another persons house and have that 2nd person have their Internet go down does not help but hurts the companies reputation and the possibility of loss of future customers because they are going to say to themselves if they are having all these issues I'm not gonna buy products from that company and may very well may tell a friend about it also.

 Very bad advice.

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FURRYe38 wrote:

Yes, my suggestion what purely troubleshooting to see if the problem followed. If it does then you'll know the XR500 is probably bad and needs to be RMAd. Reason for telling you to contact NG support anyways. Please don't read my suggestion as being anything nefarious. 

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CeeDaRula wrote:

"Do you have a friend or family member that you could loan the router to, and see if the problem happens for them? "

1) you have to be joking to ask that

2) This would mean he would not have Internet for what could be a few hours to a day since it doesn't happen right away

3) Word of mouth is a companies best advertisement or worst enemy, bringing a product that a person is having issues with to another persons house and have that 2nd person have their Internet go down does not help but hurts the companies reputation and the possibility of loss of future customers because they are going to say to themselves if they are having all these issues I'm not gonna buy products from that company and may very well may tell a friend about it also.

 Very bad advice.

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Nefarious... not at all, just saying that type of testing IMO is not good for the companies rep that's all.

Thats up to you to decide. Nothing wrong in testing out someting in a different environment to see if the problem follows. Sometimes I do give this as a suggestion while users are waiting for official support to begin or while in progress. Sometimes it can be related to users environment and not HW related.

Doesn't hurt anything. 

Good Luck. 

I will ask around and see if anyone has a spare router I can try out.  Setting up my router at someone else's house is a "negative ghost rider!"  LOL.  I've been reading through some of the postings here and noticed a couple of folks mentioned DDoS entries in the XR500 event logs.  I noticed these myself a few weeks back but didn't think anything of them since I wasn't having issues.  I wonder if the router is detecting false positives for DDoS and killing the internet or maybe experiencing a buffer overload of some sort.  I'm going to do some more even log investigation and troubleshooting.  One last thing that I find cursios is that I've had an amber light for the port I have my Sonos bridge plugged into from day one.  I have multiple Sonos speakers in house and they all communicate wirelessly to the bridge.  The bridge is hard wired to the XR500.  I've never had any issue with Sonos when the internet is working, but why the amber light....?  Doubt it means anything in relation to my drop off issue, but at this point who knows.

Had to mention it. 

If you think your seeing DDOS too much on the router, might ask your ISP to make a IP address change on the ISP modem. Then see if the router still see some of these entries. 

I would also turn off the SONO system for a while and see if the XR router still exhibits bad behavior. Sonos has been known to cause problems on many routers. Look at the user manual for the XR router about the LED colors. I see this on mine when my xboxes are off however even though they are off, there is some activity and maybe the connection drops to 100Mb while off or in low power mode. Instant ON causes this for xbox. Something maybe causing LED color indication with the XR router and Sonos. 

Thanks for the suggestions.  I will keep an eye out for more DDoS events.  Did not see any last night.  I looked up the indicator LEDs in the XR500 user manual.  Solid amber for Eth 1-4 just means router has detected a 100 or 10 mbps connection.  White means gigabit connection.  So Sonos bridge showing up amber is nothing.  However, just in case I did some reorganizing of my cables.  I had one cable going nowhere.  One of the HDDs in my NAS died and its been offline since.  So I removed this cable completely.  I also had an ethernet cable going from my smart TV to the Sonos bridge.  Sonos gives extra ethernet ports for convenience.  So I removed it and TV now goes straight to router.  Sonos and TV now show amber, but this should be ok.  One thing I did find interesting about the indicator LEDs is the Power LED.  The user manual states that solid amber for the Power LED means corrupt firmware.  When my XR500 first starts up after a hard reboot the Power LED is solid amber for about 15-30 seconds before it goes white.  This is probably nothing, but it makes me wonder if the firmware or firmware patch did not take 100%.

Yes Amber only means that your connnected devices only support 100Mb and not 1000Mb. Check with the Mfrs if your devices to see what they officially support. Most streaming or audio devices only support 100Mb currently. 

Amber is usally seen during a boot process. Means the router is booting up and hasn't come to ready. As long as the power LED changed to WHITE, you should be good. If it doesn't, then I would download the FW file, and using a wired PC, manually send the FW file again, then factory reset and setup from scratch. After setting up, do a backup configuration to file for safe keeping. 

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Xenos8 wrote:

Thanks for the suggestions.  I will keep an eye out for more DDoS events.  Did not see any last night.  I looked up the indicator LEDs in the XR500 user manual.  Solid amber for Eth 1-4 just means router has detected a 100 or 10 mbps connection.  White means gigabit connection.  So Sonos bridge showing up amber is nothing.  However, just in case I did some reorganizing of my cables.  I had one cable going nowhere.  One of the HDDs in my NAS died and its been offline since.  So I removed this cable completely.  I also had an ethernet cable going from my smart TV to the Sonos bridge.  Sonos gives extra ethernet ports for convenience.  So I removed it and TV now goes straight to router.  Sonos and TV now show amber, but this should be ok.  One thing I did find interesting about the indicator LEDs is the Power LED.  The user manual states that solid amber for the Power LED means corrupt firmware.  When my XR500 first starts up after a hard reboot the Power LED is solid amber for about 15-30 seconds before it goes white.  This is probably nothing, but it makes me wonder if the firmware or firmware patch did not take 100%.

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So I thought I was in the clear.  Internet has been up and stable for over a week.  Just got a call from my daughter, NO INTERNET!  Walked her through rebooting modem and router.  Internet is restored, POOF.  It kills me that I am never home to look at the log and see what's going on.  They never seem to show anything by the time I get home from work.  An there is no way I am enabling remote management!  As I've stated before, I doubt its my ISP because Voip phone is working when this happens and all lights look normal on ISP modem.  Last week when this happened, besides the rewiring I also removed the USB drive I had in port 1 of the XR500 and disabled geo-filtering.  Router is basic configuration now.  I am going to factory reset it one more time and if that doesn't work try for an RMA through NetGear.  This is ridiculous.

I think a RMA is warranted since the router has been out for a year and no permanent fix for this issue people are having has been available. 

So I called NetGear to initiate the RMA process of the XR500.  After some "gentle persuasion" they agreed to send me a new router.  It should arrive Monday.  I will let you know if it fixes my problem.  I think it will because my old Asus has been up for nearly two days without a problem.  What I found interesting in my RMA ticket is that the replacement router is listed as XR500 100NAS (old one is listed as just XR500).  I am wondering if its a slightly newer version of the XR500?

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Xenos8 wrote:

What I found interesting in my RMA ticket is that the replacement router is listed as XR500 100NAS (old one is listed as just XR500).  I am wondering if its a slightly newer version of the XR500?

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No. XR500-100NAS designates version 1 (-100) and NAS packaged / designated for North America (power supply, documentation, wireless region).

So I received the replacement XR500 on Saturday and set it up last night.  This time I went through the set up cable connected to router instead of wireless.  I let the router update the firmware to V2.3.2.4Na.  I also ordered all new Cat6 Ethernet cables and replaced everything connected to router.  Only time will tell if this one is stable.  I hope so.  BTW, my old Asus router was running for 5 days without issue while I waited for the XR500 replacement.  So I am pretty sure nothing is wrong with my modem (also replaced a few weeks back) or ISP.  Fingers crossed!  

Did it work? changing to other cable makes the difference? sounds weird to me, for me on another (much cheaper) router everything works fine and with XR500 any configuration i tried doesn't work and unforuntaly for me i don't have an easy option to get a replacement in my country the service is bad from netgear (which i only found out after buying and having this issue...)

You are correct that ethernet cables connected to ports 1-4 should have nothing to do with the router losing its connection to the Internet.  The device connected to a bad cable on port 1-4 would have an issue only.  The only cable that should count is the one connected to the WAN port and ISP modem, however, I decided to replace them all just in case.  Keep in mind my old Asus router had no issue what so ever with the old cables.  So far the replacement XR500 NetGear sent me has been running fine for 48 hours.  The old XR500 would lose its connection after about a week.  So I still need to give the new replacement some time before I claim success.  Side note: after I applied the patch for the current firmware (given to me by the awesome folks that are part of this community forum!) the old XR500 was fine for a month and then it crapped out........

Are you using the router with or with out a external LAN switch? Just curious. 

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Xenos8 wrote:

You are correct that ethernet cables connected to ports 1-4 should have nothing to do with the router losing its connection to the Internet.  The device connected to a bad cable on port 1-4 would have an issue only.  The only cable that should count is the one connected to the WAN port and ISP modem, however, I decided to replace them all just in case.  Keep in mind my old Asus router had no issue what so ever with the old cables.  So far the replacement XR500 NetGear sent me has been running fine for 48 hours.  The old XR500 would lose its connection after about a week.  So I still need to give the new replacement some time before I claim success.  Side note: after I applied the patch for the current firmware (given to me by the awesome folks that are part of this community forum!) the old XR500 was fine for a month and then it crapped out........

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No LAN switch.  XR500 connected to ISP Modem via Cat6 ethernet cable.  Thats it.

Ok, thanks for this. Hope the new unit works for you. Keep us posted on how it goes. 

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Xenos8 wrote:

No LAN switch.  XR500 connected to ISP Modem via Cat6 ethernet cable.  Thats it.

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