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Orbi RBE971: Selective website and DNS failures improved after disabling Protection Engine
Orbi RBE971: Selective website and DNS failures improved after disabling Protection Engine
Sharing this in case it saves someone else the time I spent chasing it.
Over the last few days, some websites loaded normally, others were very slow, and some would not load at all. This affected three laptops and multiple mobile devices. I reworked my home network, but the problem continued.
Ninjapatches.com was a consistent example. Turning off Wi-Fi on my phone allowed it to work over cellular. Connecting my laptop to a VPN also made it work while using the same home Wi-Fi.
My setup:
- Orbi RBE971 in Router mode
- Firmware: V12.1.11.15_5.4.12
- Protection Engine: 2.2.214.4/1.0.0.2049
- Brightspeed Fiber through a Calix GP1100X ONT
- DNS configured as 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8
A Cloudflare test showed 660 Mbps down, 475 Mbps up, and 0% packet loss. The useful clue came from DNS testing: lookups for Ninja Patches timed out through the Orbi and through direct queries to both Cloudflare and Google. A curl test also stopped at “Resolving timed out.”
I went to:
Advanced → Security → Protection Engine
I unchecked Enable Protection Engine and clicked Apply.
With the VPN still off, this previously failing command then succeeded:
nslookup ninjapatches.com 1.1.1.1
It returned 23.227.38.32, and browsing appeared to improve.
I’m treating this as a temporary troubleshooting workaround because it disables a security feature. I have not confirmed a permanent fix, retested every affected device, or completed a repeated on/off comparison.
Has anyone else experienced this with the RBE971 and these versions? Can NETGEAR confirm the expected Protection Engine version and whether there is a supported update or refresh procedure? I’d like to have the feature enabled without the DNS failures.
Hopefully these details help someone facing the same frustrating combination of good speed-test results and websites that refuse to load.
1 Reply
PE was implemented a couple of years ago on Orbi. I an added security measure to prevent attacks against the router from external sources. Was first seen on Nighthawk routers. I remember some users on the NH routers posted seeing similar issues early on about when PE was enabled, odd issues were seen and disappeared after PE was disable. I believe over time, NG has make updates to PE and some adjustments. Possible similar issue could be seen on Orbi with PE. Not sure if some sites may be adding to this issue as well and some sites could be doing odd things to that PE maybe preventing, nefarious or not. Maybe a learning curve here too for PE. Something you can submit a support case about and let NG know about as this would be beyond forum help. PE was implemented behind the scenes on Orbi BE series however had no user UI. I asked about NG adding a UI for this very reason.
Another reason was to ensure that users using the security testing site grc.com and it's shieldsup! test would start passing as prior versions of FW had not been passing there security test.
