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Forum Discussion
RBR850 Frequent Disconnects Starting March 9th AM EST
Yesterday 3/9, starting at about 6AM EST, my Orbi system is disconnecting my Nest Cameras and Thermostat and my work laptop every 10-20 mins or so. I have about 20 devices connected to my mesh syste...
Hey guys.
Frequent browser, first time poster. I’ve been kind of following this thread because I’ve been having the same problems. But I have stumbled upon something for my set up that I want to share just in case it helps anyone. Obviously this is with a grain of salt, but you never know. I just stumbled upon it.
So like many of you, I have gone to the new system from one of the older generations. Everything was fine until about a week ago. Then I started running into the disconnects. I followed every single suggestion in this thread to the letter. Nothing really seemed to help.
A few areas that I was really leaning towards:
1) DDOS/DOS attack based upon modem and router logs.
2) Windows 10 networking issues based upon isolated complaints from recent cumulative updates.
3) Malware infection due to recently published vulnerabilities.
Frequent browser, first time poster. I’ve been kind of following this thread because I’ve been having the same problems. But I have stumbled upon something for my set up that I want to share just in case it helps anyone. Obviously this is with a grain of salt, but you never know. I just stumbled upon it.
So like many of you, I have gone to the new system from one of the older generations. Everything was fine until about a week ago. Then I started running into the disconnects. I followed every single suggestion in this thread to the letter. Nothing really seemed to help.
A few areas that I was really leaning towards:
1) DDOS/DOS attack based upon modem and router logs.
2) Windows 10 networking issues based upon isolated complaints from recent cumulative updates.
3) Malware infection due to recently published vulnerabilities.
- I’m not sure why my post submitted before I was finished, but here’s the rest.
When I connected my older system back into my router, my problems seemingly went away. I wasn’t able to get anything working properly with firmware downgrades or with resets, etc.
However, after a day or two my old router began experiencing the same exact disconnects. And it was still on an older version of the firmware. I tried resetting that one and got it working for an hour until it started disconnecting again. That one was the RBR40 running 2.3.5.0.
I ended up hooking up the RBR850 again and doing a very religious reset after manually installing 3.2.10.11. First I reset from the configuration page, then telnet, and finally with the manual reset button. I wanted to take no chances that something was still funky.
Weirdly enough, I stumbled upon the realization that the system was not playing nicely with devices if they were set up using a static IP or with DHCP coming through another device, such as a home server. Using the router as DHCP cleared up a lot of my issues. But I was still dropping Pings approximately every 6.2 minutes on each WiFi band according to the PRTG Network Monitor I installed. The drops reduced a little bit when hardwired, but not by much.
I again reset the RBR850. And this time it changed the CTS/RTS Threshold back to 64. I noticed at that level that my ping graphs leveled out somewhat. So instead of having huge peaks and valleys for response time, it started leveling out to a more consistent amount.
Playing with it a little more, I tested lowering that threshold to 25, which I know is low. Now my pin times to the router are nearly consistent, only varying by about 1 ms on Wi-Fi. Since making these changes, I have had no connection drops at all. it has been logging for nearly 3 hours now and my connection seems to be stable.
To recap:
I’m not really sure why my old router started experiencing the same disconnects even though the firmware version was still the version from July 2019. Malware?
Resetting the device and downgrading never seemed to work. But when I reset the device in three different ways before setting it up again, it seemed to be much more stable, even with the latest troubled firmware.
It did not seem to like the fact that it was not servicing clients itself with DHCP. (Reduce the frequency of disconnects by about half.)
It seems to love the lowered CTS/RTS Threshold. (Totally eliminated disconnects)
I know some of my stuff, but I’m not a network engineer. Why all these things I did seem to be working, I do not know. But I seem to be sitting pretty right now.
Maybe this will get someone thinking about how these different things work together so that we can survive until Netgear fixes it.You might have narrowed it down, the router might be confused with external DHCP, and that could explain why I'm having problems with wired backhaul in AP mode (DHCP server is on another router).
Something to send to NG for review. I'm sure any an all information would be good for them.
Wombatmatty wrote:
I’m not sure why my post submitted before I was finished, but here’s the rest.
When I connected my older system back into my router, my problems seemingly went away. I wasn’t able to get anything working properly with firmware downgrades or with resets, etc.
However, after a day or two my old router began experiencing the same exact disconnects. And it was still on an older version of the firmware. I tried resetting that one and got it working for an hour until it started disconnecting again. That one was the RBR40 running 2.3.5.0.
I ended up hooking up the RBR850 again and doing a very religious reset after manually installing 3.2.10.11. First I reset from the configuration page, then telnet, and finally with the manual reset button. I wanted to take no chances that something was still funky.
Weirdly enough, I stumbled upon the realization that the system was not playing nicely with devices if they were set up using a static IP or with DHCP coming through another device, such as a home server. Using the router as DHCP cleared up a lot of my issues. But I was still dropping Pings approximately every 6.2 minutes on each WiFi band according to the PRTG Network Monitor I installed. The drops reduced a little bit when hardwired, but not by much.
I again reset the RBR850. And this time it changed the CTS/RTS Threshold back to 64. I noticed at that level that my ping graphs leveled out somewhat. So instead of having huge peaks and valleys for response time, it started leveling out to a more consistent amount.
Playing with it a little more, I tested lowering that threshold to 25, which I know is low. Now my pin times to the router are nearly consistent, only varying by about 1 ms on Wi-Fi. Since making these changes, I have had no connection drops at all. it has been logging for nearly 3 hours now and my connection seems to be stable.
To recap:
I’m not really sure why my old router started experiencing the same disconnects even though the firmware version was still the version from July 2019. Malware?
Resetting the device and downgrading never seemed to work. But when I reset the device in three different ways before setting it up again, it seemed to be much more stable, even with the latest troubled firmware.
It did not seem to like the fact that it was not servicing clients itself with DHCP. (Reduce the frequency of disconnects by about half.)
It seems to love the lowered CTS/RTS Threshold. (Totally eliminated disconnects)
I know some of my stuff, but I’m not a network engineer. Why all these things I did seem to be working, I do not know. But I seem to be sitting pretty right now.
Maybe this will get someone thinking about how these different things work together so that we can survive until Netgear fixes it.Thanks for the additional info. Sadly, I don't have an external DHCP server. So this isn't causing my disconnects.
No external DHCP here either. Tried every setting possible and went back to my RB50 system. Sure enough, when I reconnected that system did a FW upgrade. Now that system shows 0 satellites and 0 connected devices despite my entire network being up. Just waiting for Best Buy to open to go get an Eero Pro system. I'm done trying to spend my time fixing these issues.
