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Forum Discussion
Mikey94025
Jun 02, 2016Hero
R8500 with latest V1.0.2.54_1.0.56 intermittently loses DNS
I replaced my R7000 very recently with a R8500 and am very pleased with the faster 5G speeds. I'm running the latest R8500 firmware, V1.0.2.54_1.0.56, but notice that my DNS disappears intermittentl...
- Jun 09, 2016
Mikey94025 How's the connection after reset? I'm unable to replicate the problem you're having. The router is working perfectly with the connection.
Perhaps, it's a faulty unit.
drummin1
Jun 03, 2016Guide
Mikey94025,
I still have DNS errors a bunch of times every day and I still have the same Frontier to Nighthawk setup minus the bridged mode. I'll go out on a limb and say that none of your modem or router lights give any hint of connectivity changes durning these DNS hiccups, do they? My pair of paperweights flicker LED signals back and forth on the ethernet ports that connect them. Just like they do when I can actually get online. Nothing externally visual on either unit indicates trouble.
Like I said, DNS errors happen every day, several times a day. And roughly during the same few hour windows each day. I use the outages like a clock. They happen at 3am, 5am, 11am, 3pm, 9pm every day. The first thing I do is close Chrome and immediately reopen it. The first two bookmarks are the modem then the router. I open two tabs and log into each unit in its own tab. Starting with the modem, I scan for any thing amiss. There never is. Sometimes I reboot the modem sometimes I dont. As the R8500 is second in the chain, I click on its tab and 9 times outta 10 the "Internet Status" is red. I've released/renewed addresses, rebooted it from the "router information" panel under "advanced", clicked on the "internet status" and clicked the "test" button, etc.
Doesnt matter all that much which DNS servers I have listed it seems. OpenDNS has the honors right now but I have used Google or the ISP defaults.
I should clarify that putting my Frontier in bridge mode was only a for a few days because I was desparate. I could no longer access the modem's web interface obviously and the DNS errors popped up like they always did, so I reset the modem. The Frontier gets the phone lines coming in and only feeds the R8500 via one ethernet cable, Wireless is disabled on the modem too. I cant duck the outages by flipping from wireless to hardwired on any tech we have.
I ran pings to www.google.com with the /t switch enabled from anywhere I could. Timed out or got some crazy 2800ms pings. Updated R8500 thru 102 54 1056 firmware. Didn't matter. I pointed our tech around the router and modem to OpenDNS.and still have DNS errors just as often.
I was looking real hard at the Frontier modem as the culprit because of the rough schedule that the errors kept. Except all our connected electronics got IP and DNS from the R8500. The modem only ever passed one preferred address to the router and used OpneDNS too.
Now I'm back to the R8500. Remember when I said, that from all outward appearances, the modem and router were blinking their LED's like everything's a go. Yet the R8500 is the only web interface where I saw the red "internet status" tile. In fact, the "advanced" tab had all green checked tiles every time. Short of the one red tile on the "basic" tab. And your "internet status" always reads GOOD. So what the hell?
The outage seems more of a duration event than one where we jiggle some wires with intermittent shorts, since neither of us has any luck with our varying approaches. Almost like a thermal enent occured which reset when the temp threshold is met. I don't know. I tried taking our iphones off wifi to ease congestion. I can't say it helped. Except for the iphone themselves. Not havng them on the home network, they will work while all others suffer.
Mikey94025
Jun 03, 2016Hero
Thank you for that very detailed reply! I will do some careful inspection of my R8500 status if the problem happens again (so far not seen today). I only checked the internet status on the Advanced tab but will also check the Basic tab the next time.
- drummin1Jun 04, 2016Guide
Just FYI, but I had installed the Netgear Genie app on my work laptop which is wired direct to the Netgear. Sort of a minute by minute monitor of the path to internet. That was more depressing than the DNS errors themselves. Connectivity issues were popping up in my taskbar from the Genie more often than we were aware of. There may be smaller hiccups that occur more regularly than the ones you and I get frustrated by. They may go unoticed as we arent accessing the web 100% of the time to 100% of the throughput even if we sit at the computer all day. We stream Netflix, etc. and the buffer is large enough to maybe smooth out smaller burps but when we get the 25% loaded screen that hangs, we know the big belch has occured. I got so distracted by the steady taskbar popups from Genie that I just uninstalled it. TMI and right in my face while I'm supposed to be working.
I have an older work laptop. Perhaps I shall run the ping /t www.google.com from evening til morning. That'll give a second by second picture of it's performance. Pretty sad when I gotta have my router fill out a timecard, no?
Frontier has tested both phone lines and they perform nearly identically.
Glad your gonna eyeball the web interface when you can. It seems odd that one tile on the "basic" panel identifies a problem but the tiles on the "advanced" tab all have the green checkmarks and even show the OpenDNS server addresses, etc.
Good luck,
-Mike
- Mikey94025Jun 06, 2016Hero
Unfortunately my DNS outage happened twice again tonight (it was ~7pm, +/- 15 min). I was able to spend some time diagnosing and narrowed it to only DNS functionality through the R8500 itself:
- I can ssh to external hosts if I use an IP address. I can also make web requests via IP address.
- If I change my Windows adapter DNS from the router IP (192.168.1.1) to Google DNS (8.8.8.8) then the DNS and web browsing works again on my laptop.
- The R8500 Basic and Advanced tabs both reported that the Internet status was GOOD.
- The first time it failed I changing the R8500 DNS from "Get Automatically from ISP" to a static IP (8.8.8.8 and 75.75.75.75 - The Comcast DNS) but it did not restore the DNS. I changed it again to (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) and DNS came back. I've seen the issue with static DNS before so I don't think it matters and restarting the router just often restores the DNS.
- I was turning off random functions and DNS went away after I turned off UPNP (and so the router had to restart).
This doesn't seem like a hardware issue since it's so specific to DNS. I can always return the router if I have to, but I'd first want to try hard reset or downgrade the firmware.
- ElaineMJun 09, 2016NETGEAR Employee Retired
Mikey94025 How's the connection after reset? I'm unable to replicate the problem you're having. The router is working perfectly with the connection.
Perhaps, it's a faulty unit.