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Forum Discussion
Getting DNS_PROBE_POSSIBLE error on R8000
In about the last month and a half, I have started noticing two things: * pings spike every 5 minutes, from about 8-9ms, to over 1000ms, for 5-10 seconds (this messes up Remote Desktop) * DNS_PR...
As promised, following up.
The FreshTomato firmware is awesome. It allows me to watch network traffic and drill in to where problems are so much better than any router firmware I've ever used before. Beautiful pie charts showing what IP address is using what.
I am still working my way in to the QOS. It is definitely an art and a "little bit at a time" kind of thing. But I've been able to set priorities for different things, usually by port. I've identified ports for MS Teams, Zoom, and Google Meetings. Identifying the Roku traffic is easy--its the whole device, so nope, sorry, you can have bandwidth when its available, but you're not a priority when I'm in a meeting.
I'm finding I turn QOS on, and when my son is in a meeting, I watch the traffic to try to make sure he's getting priority....and wait for him to squawk if there's a problem. At this point I'm kind of on stand by to make sure I can turn it off quickly if it has issues.
I've also been able to identify some things that can get a lower priority, like uploads and such. They can trickle out, it doesn't need to be right now.
So there's still some watching, learning, figuring out, but I feel like this is going to be fantastic. My audio and video in meetings seems to be pretty good, without disrupting other network users too much. Depending on what other network users are doing, disruption is appropriate.
As far as the NetGear stock firmware. I kind of get why they don't want to expose a lot of this functionality. If they did, they would get so many calls from people who are having all sorts of connection problems. I knew and accepted the risks. Great thing is, you can turn QOS off without losing your settings. But it must be frustrating to the hardware engineers who create this stuff when their features are hidden.
In a nutshell, I think I can say, if you don't have a problem to fix, you probably don't want to do this. From what I read, it's not that hard to brick your router. But if you have problems and want to try something different, are a bit technically savvy and willing to spend some time getting it right, it might be interesting to try.