Router Login Dysfunctional Due To NetGear Web Site Dependency

  Nighthawk RAX40 router inevitably auto-updates to acquire defective firmware that plays a dysfunctional variation of the “ET phone home” game, always returning “something went wrong” and suggesting things that will have no effect. The defective firmware first started disabling setup access in April 2024. It doesn’t seem like much to ask to remove a bug that makes a product appear to be impossible to configure, but if NetGear has rolled out a fix, it doesn’t seem to have rolled within reach of the customers yet.

   The so-called ‘solutions’ offered here have been.

    (1) “disconnect from modem, restart router, back up router configuration, perform factory reset, downgrade firmware revision to last working version (before April 2024), restart router, restore configuration, reconnect router to modem, restart router”… which works rather temporarily until the router self-updates no matter what configuration options are chosen and the router is once again using a later version of the firmware that seeks to contact NetGear to obtain a permission and fails leaving the owner blocked from the setup page.

  (2) “disconnect router from modem and restart router to obtain local access to the router setup, then reconnect the router to the modem and restart it again to go online” which can be used to work around the firmware bug but it’s somewhere between a nuisance and a nightmare.

  If someone from NetGear support would be so kind as to let the firmware team that they’re limiting the choices for the future career path of their co-workers, suppliers, and marketing channel partners perhaps they could devote  a few minutes to disabling the build option for the offending code in the firmware builds for the consumer products it doesn’t belong on, or adding the missing conditional compilation preprocessor directive if it was omitted.