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RBK735S 3 unit mesh drops WiFi daily for 2-3 minutes - Anyone Experiencing This?
(reposting to correct forum) My 3 week old RBK735S 3 unit mesh drops WiFi daily for 2-3 minutes. Is anyone else working from home and noticing this random interruption daily? For me, I'm on video c...
All,
Thanks for your suggestions. As a follow-up to my note of 2021-04-22 04:22 PM, I made several changes which seem to have had some positive effects.
Per my other note, per suggestions on Reddit, I:
- Turned off Traffic Meter,
- Disconnected my one hard wired device from a Satellite
- Continued to add devices to Advanced -> Lan Setup -> "Address Reservations"
- Changed my NTP server. NTP was showing Dec, 2020
- I renewed my DHCP lease for the Router, to a time of day just before going to bed, with a 7 day renewal duration.
- I have also been running a ping command non-stop to 8.8.8.8 and logging the output (2 pings every 5 seconds).
That combination of changes has provided some stability over the past week. I suspect the root cause may have been with the Traffic Meter (#1) (many on Reddit seem to think so), but also (#4 and #5) might be better hiding the issue as it may be happening when I sleep now. I'm not totally convinced of this because while some ping drops occur, I no longer see 2-3 minutes of total network loss between the RBR and the Modem. There have also been no patches auto downloaded this week, which could also be the root cause for these interruptions.
Also worth mentioning, that on item #4, I was not able to provide ntp IP addresses for "Set your preferred NTP server". Rather I had to specify a A Record, which took me a while to figure out "time.nist.gov" did the trick.
I'll let you know if I have anything further to share.
The issue occurred again this morning. Here is some additional debugging information:
- The Guest Network continued to work fine, and from the same location of my laptop.
- I switched my laptop from main network to Guest, and ping worked fine.
- I re-switched to the main network and ping failed (again)
- I re-switched to guest and ping worked (again)
- I re-switched to the main network and ping failed (again)
- I tested my phone (connected via ethernet / hardwire) to Arris Modem, worked fine throughout the incident
I am wondering if I have a defective Satellite. Why would the Guest network continue to work while the main network failed (same Satellite) for 5 straight minutes?
Last night I switch my laptop to a static IP address on the ORBI to try to rule out the DHCP lease variable (obviously made no difference).
When this occurs again, I will move the laptop to a different part of my house and try to connect to a different Satellite or the Router and see if the same behavior occurs.
What is the size of your home? Sq Ft?
What is the distance between the router and satellite(s)? 30 feet or more is recommended in between RBR and RBS to begin with depending upon building materials when wirelessly connected.
https://kb.netgear.com/31029/Where-should-I-place-my-Orbi-satelliteTry testing with out any RBS online. Then try test with 1 RBS then 2 RBS. Swap locations with the RBS to see if the problem follows.
Auto? Try setting manual channel 1, 6 or 11 on 2.4Ghz and 40 to 48 channel on 5Ghz.
Any Wifi Neighbors near by? If so, how many?Has a factory reset and setup from scratch been performed since last FW update?
Press the back reset button for 15 seconds then release.
https://kb.netgear.com/31486/How-do-I-reset-my-Orbi-system-to-factory-default-settings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePZSc7vnRlQAnd here is some additional information....
So looking in the logs, I can see DHCP requests coming from devices shortly after the incident (because they were dropped from the ORBI satellite). What is really interesting is both ORBI Satellites made DHCP lease requests to the Router which implies that the Satellites themselves are being dropped and forced to re-request IP addresses from the Router. This explains a lot of what's going on here, I think.
I think the fact the guest network continued to work may have been a result of my laptop actually connecting directly to the Router instead of to the Satellite (it is close enough that it could do that) which also explains slower ping times and variability in those ping times.
In any event, this is bad news because I cannot manage DHCP leases in ORBI, other than to uncheck the box that says "Use Router as DHCP Server"
If I uncheck that box - what are the implications? How are devices going to obtain IP addresses and not collide? I cannot set a static IP address on every device, it's not possible.
Try testing with out any RBS online. Then try test with 1 RBS then 2 RBS. Swap locations with the RBS to see if the problem follows.
Disabling DHCP will cause devices to not get a IP address when they are Dynamic configured for IP addressing.
So I have confirmed in the Logs that after each of these incidents, which are now happening several times per day, there are several DHCP requests and so I suspect this is somehow part of the issue. You can see some of the same devices are retrying several times to get a lease.
[DHCP IP: (10.0.0.15)] to MAC address 78:4F:43:64:5E:E2, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 16:08:46
[DHCP IP: (10.0.0.9)] to MAC address 14:C1:4E:01:BE:34, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 16:08:44
[DHCP IP: (10.0.0.6)] to MAC address F2:8B:92:56:EA:F0, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 16:08:27
[DHCP IP: (10.0.0.6)] to MAC address F2:8B:92:56:EA:F0, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 16:07:33
[DHCP IP: (10.0.0.9)] to MAC address 14:C1:4E:01:BE:34, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 16:06:51
[DHCP IP: (10.0.0.9)] to MAC address 14:C1:4E:01:BE:34, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 16:04:58
[DHCP IP: (10.0.0.9)] to MAC address 14:C1:4E:01:BE:34, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 16:03:13
[DHCP IP: (192.168.2.9)] to MAC address 3A:E0:AF:F8:AB:DB, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 16:02:25
[DHCP IP: (10.0.0.6)] to MAC address F2:8B:92:56:EA:F0, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 16:01:59
[DHCP IP: (192.168.2.6)] to MAC address 7C:2A:31:6A:A5:54, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 16:01:31
[DHCP IP: (10.0.0.14)] to MAC address 7C:2A:31:6A:A5:54, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 15:53:30
[DHCP IP: (10.0.0.17)] to MAC address DC:FB:48:BE:B4:6E, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 15:44:59
[DHCP IP: (10.0.0.19)] to MAC address DC:71:96:83:45:4B, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 15:21:12
[DHCP IP: (192.168.2.3)] to MAC address 48:43:DD:3E:8F:9A, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 15:17:06
[DHCP IP: (10.0.0.19)] to MAC address DC:71:96:83:45:4B, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 15:15:11
[DHCP IP: (192.168.2.8)] to MAC address 9C:5A:44:C5:4B:64, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 14:47:09
[DHCP IP: (192.168.2.7)] to MAC address DC:71:96:83:45:4B, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 14:25:58
[DHCP IP: (192.168.2.7)] to MAC address DC:71:96:83:45:4B, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 14:23:44
[DHCP IP: (10.0.0.17)] to MAC address DC:FB:48:BE:B4:6E, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 13:56:47
[DHCP IP: (10.0.0.14)] to MAC address 7C:2A:31:6A:A5:54, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 13:52:44
[DHCP IP: (10.0.0.17)] to MAC address DC:FB:48:BE:B4:6E, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 13:36:51
[DHCP IP: (10.0.0.17)] to MAC address DC:FB:48:BE:B4:6E, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 13:29:14
[DHCP IP: (192.168.2.2)] to MAC address F8:54:B8:71:97:94, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 13:26:58
[DHCP IP: (10.0.0.14)] to MAC address 7C:2A:31:6A:A5:54, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 12:57:30
[DHCP IP: (192.168.2.3)] to MAC address 48:43:DD:3E:8F:9A, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 12:50:49
[DHCP IP: (10.0.0.14)] to MAC address 7C:2A:31:6A:A5:54, Thursday, Apr 22,2021 12:46:15On Reddit there were some additional suggestions which I performed ahead of this latest 16:03 outage:
- Disable Traffic Meter
- Disconnect any hardwired devices from ethernet ports
- Reserve IP addresses for both Satellites (attempt to avoid DHCP requests from those devices)
- Reboot Router, then Satellite #1, then Satellite #2
I have to say, I think I've tried everything at this point and will likely return the Mesh, unless someone can help. Netgear support is worthless. Their help was to upgrade the firmware (which I already did).
For $700, you expect this hardware to work out of the box. This is rediculous.
