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Forum Discussion
RBR20 Firmware update and stability issues with Circle enabled
At the beginning of March, I updated the firmware on my RBR20 & RBS20's; the new firmware was v2.6.2.104 and, as far as I can tell, the previous one was 2.6.1.36. Immediately, everyone in the house w...
btgrant wrote:Before the update in March, I have to say that my experience with the the RBR20 had been nothing less than stellar, but the road since then has been rough and I've started wondering if it wouldn't be more productive to replace the whole setup.
There is zero dollar cost to manually loading the previous firmware on the Orbi. (Labor cost, but not money).
It is a continuing mystery why some Orbi owners experience no issues with the latest firmware and others have constant problems.
A manual update involves downloading firmware from the Netgear support site for the RBR20 and RBS20
https://kb.netgear.com/000062432/RBR20-Firmware-Version-2-6-1-36
Unpack the zip file to extract the *.img files for router and satellite.
Log into the Orbi administrative web interface http://orbilogin.net
Select the advanced Tab, Administration, Firmware Update, Manual Update Tab.
Then follow the directions to upload the firmware files.
(I, personally, prefer to connect directly to the satellite web interface (same login credentials) and do the Firmware Update directly on the satellite.)
Thank you for the suggestion. I did try backing off to a previous firmware w/out any results; I can't believe I left all that out. Long story short, because I was pretty sure I was on 2.6.1.36 before the "upgrade" to 2.6.2.104, I manually installed 2.6.1.36 on both the router and satellites; this was before the factory reset. At this point, I suppose it wouldn't hurt to go back further than 2.6.1.36, though I'm not sure which one that would be. Getting the firmware files for 2.6.1.36 wasn't very straightforward if I remember correctly.
The reason I think that 2.6.1.36 was the most recent version that was stable for me is that I checked for updates on a pretty regular basis and would update whenever they were avilable. I guess I learned my lesson there...
I have no explanation as to what could cause some users to have zero issues with a specific Orbi firmware and others face constant serious problems. But, it is obviously the case because there are so many posts that begin with... "I updated firmware, and NOW..."
Factory Reset and reconfigure seems to work a lot of the time. If it does not, however, there seems to be no other solution but to go back.
I have one Orbi RBR50 that is running 2.3.5.0 from summer 2019 and working fine. (It is 3,000 miles away and I won't update the firmware until I can be there in person to deal with the results.) My other Orbi RBR50 is on 2.7.2.104, also with no issues.
So I have a question about the advice about connecting to the web interface. I definitely used it to downgrade the firmware the first time. But, after I had done so and was doing the factory reset, I remember that I ended up in a state where the setup didn't want to complete until after I had updated to the latest firmware. I might have been using the app to do the setup at that point. It sounds like I should:
- Downgrade the firmware (I'm thinking of going back to 2.5.1.16)
- Trigger the factory reset
- Stick with the web interface through the end of the setup in the hopes that I won't get stuck re-updating the firmware again.
