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Forum Discussion
RAX120 Router Random Disconnects
Hey everyone, I know that I'm not the only one with problems on the Nighthawk WiFi 6 devices, but thought I'd post my most recent headache. My hardware consists of a Motorola MB8600 DOCS 3.1 modem w/...
I just posted this in another thread, but thought I'd throw it up here.
For what it's worth, I think I've found the cause of this on my router. I've had my RAX120 a few months now and haven't had a problem. Like most other posts on the subject my issues started happening early March. I saw another post about firefox switching the default protocol to DNS-over-HTTPS (https://www.computerworld.com/article/3529424/firefox-starts-switching-on-dns-over-https-to-encrypt-lookups-stymie-tracking.html) and tested it using the routers Default DNS server settings. Sure enough, soon after having a couple pages open in Firefox all DNS was broken and thus the 'internets' were unavailable.
I left the setting enabled in Firefox (and stopped using it for now). I switched my default to Chromium Edge and the network has been solid for 24+ hours vs. the 1-2 hours I was getting.
Currently my firmware is rolled back to 108 and it's been solid. After another 24 hours I'll go back to 114 with 118 hotfix. My DNS server is set to cloudflare right now.
Curious on anyone else's testing, have you checked for DNS over HTTPS causing your problems? I've not seen a solid list of who uses this or doesn't use it, but I believe I saw a reference that Netflix in Windows will use DoH as well as Firefox. For the time being I'm avoiding both of those as I have 2 people working from home thanks to C-19. Will try to 'break' DNS resolving again this weekend by doing everything in Firefox.
FYI: Readers of this thread may be interested in OpenDNS Prosumer, a product that uses an IPsec tunnel to encrypt DNS traffic for privacy, and blocks malware domains for security. I have used it since installing a RAX120 a few months ago, and have not observed any DNS problems to-date.
Yeah OpenDNS is nice but it doesn't help with this problem at all since the problem is in the Router Proxying DNS request. If you happen to be manually setting DNS on your downstream devices you could bypass the issue or if your using DHCP server not on the Netgear you may also bypass this particular problem and configure DNS resolver on your endpoints that is something other than the Router address.... If you don't use the router as your DNS resolver this particular issues would not affect you.