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Forum Discussion
RAX40 Firmware 1.0.3.80 Crash/Bug Log
Hello folks, can everyone please log all the issues they are experiencing with the RAX40 router on 1.0.3.80 firmware under this thread, I see there are several threads going on about the issue, figur...
My RAX40 came with firmware version .64 initially. I upgraded it to .80 shortly after it was released. I was running it without Smart Connect enabled. It ran fine for a few months until we had a brief power brown-out of about 1-second, after which no Wifi devices could connect. It indicated in the admin GUI that everything was fine, but refused to allow Wifi or WAN access. Connecting to the cable modem directly with a laptop proved the WAN modem was working fine.
Several reboots, power-cycles later, and finally had Wifi access but no WAN access, even though its GUI status showed everything was fine for the WAN access. Cleary, it was NOT fine.
A factory reset later, and things started working again. Briefly. After everything was reconnected and working, I connected the printer to it over Wifi successfully, but the router mass-disconnected every Wifi device (including the printer), before allowing them all to reconnect about a minute later. Bad omen.
Again it ran fine until we needed the printer again, and, as suspected, the router booted everything offline again. So the problems are not just related to Smart Connect as I was not running it when my problems began, and yet the problems still happened afterwards with it enabled during the next outage problem.
Clearly this is a firmware problem and releasing a firmware update that fixes these problems should be a priority for Netgear.
I have rolled back to the .64 firmware for now. For the sake of simplicity in setting up the network I enabled Smart Connect for now as I had a video conference interview to attend that same day. I am likely to disable Smart Connect whenever I have the house to myself for long enough to reconfigure all of the devices again, I want my main PC on the 5GHz band but Smart Connect forces it onto the 2.4GHz band because it thinks it is the better band for it, which it is not.
If it crashes again, I will be shutting it down and rolling back to my old D-Link DIR-862L, which was perfectly stable though quite old, and as such it was having challenges handling all the bandwidth and devices we had connected to it. But I would rather have performance challenges than complete outages, given the choice.
update: I've just gotten off the phone with L2 tech expert for follow up on my case.. was on the phone for a good hour working with them to collect logs, configuration backup file, screenshots of various things, and other data to try facilitate escalation of this ridiculous issue. They said I'd hear back from them within 3-7 days... I'm still not very hopeful.
I'll be sticking to this beta firmware until then and monitoring any further drops in WIFI. The internal 500 error when accessing the router's admin console / debug page is an odd one too.
Update on beta firmware: it's been about 4 full days now that my router has been up and no WIFI drops. I am also still able to access the router admin and debug consoles (no longer running into Internal Error 500 issues). This may be because I am no longer writing debug logs to the router itself, but rather to my connected USB drive. Maybe the writing of debug logs to the system memory of the router caused it to be overloaded which intuirn caused the Internal 500 Error. Who knows? I may switch back to writing to system memory to see if I encounter the issue again.
Thanks for the update, you are giving me some hope. For the most part my router has been stable after backing out to .64 but I've started looking into getting a different router. Hopefully your testing continues to be positive and we can just update to a firmware that fixes the issues. Thanks again!
CLBTuco wrote:Thanks for the update, you are giving me some hope. For the most part my router has been stable after backing out to .64 but I've started looking into getting a different router. Hopefully your testing continues to be positive and we can just update to a firmware that fixes the issues. Thanks again!
You're welcome. Yep, .64 is much more stable than .80, but I did not find it an acceptable "solution" to the faulty .80 firmware hence why I took matters into my own hands due to the lack of proactive communication or support from Netgear on the matter.
It's been almost 5 days now that the router has been up and running with no drops, so I'm positive there is something that was done right with this version of the firmware. Even with AX on I have had no issues. I do not use smart connect however, so I cannot comment on that.