Two Netgear WNDAP360 loosing settings & no upgrade possible
Hello everybody,
a client of mine (@REBeLo_2021) has two Netgear WNDAP360's in use for a pretty standard Home Setup. The Access Points are used solely as bridges between the LAN and Wifi portion of his network. A Zyxel USG40 is being used as the 'main' router, which mantains the only DHCP Server on the network and is providing the firewall. All network devices are connected via (multiple) Ethernet Switches. The configuration for the two WNDAP360's is straightforward, two secured Wifi networks (2.4 Ghz & 5 Ghz) are set, country, password, IP- and time settings are changed and nothing else. The AP's are located on top of a plaster ceiling, where nobody can accidently access the gear.
The setup worked without a hitch for more than 4 years. But on Wednesday one of the WNDAP360's reset itself to the standard configuration. I simply reconfigured it, mirroring the configuration of the other Access Point. Unfortunatly, the next morning, the same problem occured, all settings were lost. Well then, I configured the AP again and made a configuration backup, so that one can save some time if the problem persists. And it did persist - just not on this router. The other AP of the same model now lost it's complete settings in the night to friday. Uploading the backup settings just triggered a settings reset after half an hour. Upgrading both AP's from version 3.7.9.0 to the newest is not possible, since the md5 checksum of the downloaded image is a mismatch. (Yes, we've downloaded it multiple times) In the logs, there's nothing interesting to be found, except for this message:
root: ERROR: invalid md5sum of vmlinux.gz.uImage
Additionally it looks like the log exporter has just captured the logs after the settings were resetted.
How can two routers of the same model and make display the same faulty beheaviour after working for years without problems? Has anyone got a clue what I can investigate? Nothing really has changed in his network, apart from a new KNX doorbell, which was installed about a week prior to the problems. I guess the next step would be the reinstallation of the firmware via USB.
