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mgalgs's avatar
mgalgs
Aspirant
Jun 07, 2021
Solved

Some domains related to cryptocurrency mining are blocked and possibly crashing my Orbi router

I've been having issues with my Orbi router blocking certain domains related to cryptocurrency mining, and possibly crashing my router. I've never been able to access getmonero.org from behind my router, but if I'm connected directly to my cable modem I can access it just fine. So I know it's not my ISP and it's not my host machine. Since changing NOTHING except removing my Orbi router fixes the issue I can only conclude that the Orbi is blocking the domain. I don't have anything on my Orbi "block sites" or "block services". DNS resolution of getmonero.org works fine, but TCP connections always return "Connection refused".

 

Recently I've been having issues accessing flexpool.io as well. I mine ethereum when my PC is idle (I have solar so the energy costs are not an issue) and have used flexpool.io in the past for this, but starting a month ago or so I started seeing weird behavior where connections to flexpool.io were intermittently blocked. Just like with getmonero.org, DNS resolution was fine, but the actual TCP connections would always return "Connection refused". Then a few days ago after firing up my Ethereum miner for the first time in a few weeks my router crashed entirely. I couldn't get in to the management interface or anything, I had to do a factory reset. I didn't think it could possibly have been my network access to flexpool.io that crashed the router so I fired things back up again today. Everything looked fine at first, flexpool.io was loading fine and I was mining ETH successfully, but lo and behold after a few hours of mining connections to flexpool.io stopped working again. The Orbi hasn't crashed yet but I assume it's already in some kind of corrupted state and will probably do a factory reset anyway.

 

It's absolutely blowing my mind that network traffic to crypto sites is nuking my $1k mesh wifi router, but I don't know what else to conclude at this point. Any ideas on further troubleshooting I can perform here?

 

My firmware version is V3.2.18.1_1.4.14. My model wasn't available in the dropdown menu above, but I have the RBK853 AX6000 (Amazon link). Main router plus 4 satellites.

5 Replies

  • mgalgs's avatar
    mgalgs
    Aspirant
    Jun 07, 2021

    Curious if anyone with an Orbi system can try accessing getmonero.org as a simple test since that's so reliably "blocked" for me. If you don't want to load it in a browser a simple `curl` test is fine:

    ❯ curl -L getmonero.org
curl: (7) Failed to connect to www.getmonero.org port 443: Connection refused

    Curious to see if anyone else can reproduce this issue because some searching online for other reports has proved fruitless.

  • michaelkenward's avatar
    michaelkenward
    Guru
    Jun 07, 2021
    mgalgs wrote:

    My model wasn't available in the dropdown menu above, but I have the RBK853 AX6000 (Amazon link). Main router plus 4 satellites.

    It helps to post in the right section for your device.

     

    You have posted your message in the section of this community given over to General WiFi Routers (Non-Nighthawk). (This is easily done, given Netgear's complicated community structure.)

    Many questions apply to different types of device, so you might get responses here, but you might get more help, and find earlier questions and answers specific to your hardware, in the appropriate section for your device. That's probably here:

    Orbi - NETGEAR Communities

    I will ask the Netgear moderator to move your message.

    In the meantime you could visit the support pages:

    Support | NETGEAR

    Feed in your model number and check the documentation for your hardware.

    You may have done this already. I can't tell from your message.

    I mention it because Netgear gave up on supplying paper manuals years ago and people sometimes miss the downloads.