Forum Discussion

Aspirant

Jul 02, 2024

Solved

Nighthawk RAX30 log/email notification bug

I've looked everywhere and can't for the life of me work out where to submit a bug report to Netgear. They don't seem to be interested in allowing customer report bugs. Anyway... I would like to ...

Paul_0
Jul 10, 2024
Thanks for the tips but I couldn't follow your exact steps as the web page was different and didn't offer the same options. But I got onto "Chat" with an agent any way. All I wanted to do was report a bug as a concerned Customer of their product. Apparently my registered product only had 90 days of technical support and that has long expired. They offered to extend my support (at a cost I presume) so they could "assist" me. They closed the chat before I had a chance to respond within a few minutes. I give up with Netgear's useless support and reporting a problem.

Ever since turning off Email notifications the router has now been rock solid for 9 days. Prior to "testing" email notifications out, it was rock solid for approx 7 months. Definitely a problem in their firmware, but I can't be ar$ed chasing it up any further. My problem is fixed. Just don't use Email notifications on RAX30 routers.

Paul_0

Aspirant

Jul 10, 2024

Thanks for the tips but I couldn't follow your exact steps as the web page was different and didn't offer the same options. But I got onto "Chat" with an agent any way. All I wanted to do was report a bug as a concerned Customer of their product. Apparently my registered product only had 90 days of technical support and that has long expired. They offered to extend my support (at a cost I presume) so they could "assist" me. They closed the chat before I had a chance to respond within a few minutes. I give up with Netgear's useless support and reporting a problem.

Ever since turning off Email notifications the router has now been rock solid for 9 days. Prior to "testing" email notifications out, it was rock solid for approx 7 months. Definitely a problem in their firmware, but I can't be ar$ed chasing it up any further. My problem is fixed. Just don't use Email notifications on RAX30 routers.

michaelkenward

Guru - Experienced User

Jul 10, 2024

Paul_0 wrote:

Definitely a problem in their firmware, but I can't be ar$ed chasing it up any further. My problem is fixed. Just don't use Email notifications on RAX30 routers.

Makes sense. Pointless faffing around with something as peripheral as this feature.

One question though, which email service were you using to send messages?

I have found that some work better than others. Some just don't work.

Another finding that sort of confirms your firmware suspicion is that I have tried email logs on a handful of devices. These routers don't all behave in the same way. Some are fine with GMail, others bomb out.

Paul_0
Aspirant
Jul 10, 2024
michaelkenward wrote:
Makes sense. Pointless faffing around with something as peripheral as this feature.
One question though, which email service were you using to send messages?
I used Gmail and specifically set up an app password to get around their 2FA when sending via their SMTP (smtp.gmail.com) on port 465. The emails were getting through to Gmail fine. Using both a once off test "send log" and also with the scheduled "when log is full" notifications.

I did a little analysis of the logs by copying the content body into Notepad++ (text editor). I noticed they were exactly 1024 lines. So they have a log buffer (memory collection/list or internal file) limited to 1K lines. I also noticed when the router crapped itself after sending these emails, that it may have been busy at the time with receiving more log entries while attempting to copy the existing log entries, sending the email, clearing the log and starting over. The logs showed some of our household PC's tend to spam the router with requests such as:
...
[UPnP set event: GetTotalBytesReceived] from source: 192.168.1.4, Sunday, June 30, 2024 06:12:48 [UPnP set event: GetTotalBytesSent] from source: 192.168.1.4, Sunday, June 30, 2024 06:12:48
<End of Log>
I noticed those UPnP requests would normally come in a flurry of 126 lines in the log in a couple of seconds. But the emailed logs would only have a smaller sub-set of those at the very end. So it was in the middle of receiving the flurry at the time of processing the email. I can only presume the router fails to double buffer and protect itself whilst sending, clearing and receiving new log entries. Just smells like a memory buffer overflow, or lack of wait states / multi-threaded unsafe operation handling causing the router to fault.

Those were my thoughts anyway. Nothing that Netgear's extended support costs would help me with haha.