Unable to enable wireless

[janzend]

This morning the wireless went out on my router and I'm unable to turn it back on. When i go to the basic page is shows wireless off and a yellow caution sign on the setting, see attached. I have reset the router, pressed the physical buttons several times and toggled it in the settings, I will get teh peds on for wireless, 2.5, and 5ghz radio - but it still shows disabled. Customer service sent mere here to check for help since past its 90 day support window.

[danekan · Accepted solution]

The second to right LED on the top is actually a button that disables wireless. If you hold it down for 5 seconds, it will disable wireless on the device, and will show it disabled in the GUI but there's no way to re-enable it. To re-enable it, hold down the button again for 5 seconds, the lights for wireless on the left will turn on when it is back on.
I was cleaning yesterday and moved the router behind my TV, and the TV was just resting on top of it. I was using it all day but at some point apparently the TV moved enough to push the button... Kind of weird there's no entry in the log of when this is pushed though, too.

[Babylon5]

Have you checked the router page ‘Advanced’ – ‘Advanced Setup’ – ‘Wireless Settings’ to see if ‘Enable Wireless Router Radio’ is checked for both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands?

[danekan]

I woke up this morning to the exact same problem.

The advanced show it is activated for both 2.5 and 5, I've tried deactivating, saving, rebooting, re-activating, saving, rebooting. Deactivating/Reactivating/Saving without reboot... etc. Guest network not showing up, either. Tried same options on those.
It's like there's an overall wireless radio flag set to turn it off... IDK.

I've done everything short of restoring it to factory.

The only thing I did yesterday was I configured a LAN-attached wireless camera to upload pictures to the attached USB drive on motion. That is actually working, but I removed that, powered the device off, deleted the files it had uploaded, removed the USB drive even before reboot/etc. to try to rule that out. That was in the morning and I used the router on wireless all day, was browsing until I went to bed and obviously I didn't reconfigure the router in my sleep. 😕

Logs don't show anything abnormal or any errors/warnings either.

[danekan · Accepted solution]

The second to right LED on the top is actually a button that disables wireless. If you hold it down for 5 seconds, it will disable wireless on the device, and will show it disabled in the GUI but there's no way to re-enable it. To re-enable it, hold down the button again for 5 seconds, the lights for wireless on the left will turn on when it is back on.
I was cleaning yesterday and moved the router behind my TV, and the TV was just resting on top of it. I was using it all day but at some point apparently the TV moved enough to push the button... Kind of weird there's no entry in the log of when this is pushed though, too.

[greenmaze]

danekan,

Good information. I've had the same problem now several times. All of the sudden wireless stops working and there's no way to re-enable it through the web interface. The way I've been recovering is resetting to factory defaults and then reconfiguring. It never occurred to me that my 5 year old might be pressing the button.

If you're from Netgear and reading this, this is a terrible UI. I already sent one of these back because of this very issue. At the very least, give us the ability to disable these buttons.

[Sunscape]

I had the same issue. Backed up config and then reset to factory settings. All worked fine again. I manually re-added the changes to config and still worked (Apart from the ongoing frequent rebooting bu that is a separate issue). Backed up that config and then reloaded my original config. Sure enough wireless radio lights went out and no way to enable them as they still showed enabled in the UI. Reverted to "new" backup and all working again. Did this a few times to make sure. I was going to log it as a bug but as the random rebooting got so annoying I gave up and returned the unit to the retailer.

So - Reset to factory and then manually rebuild your settings. Backup the config a few times along the way if you are changing many items.

[bill1228]

greenmaze wrote:

danekan, Good information. I've had the same problem now several times. All of the sudden wireless stops working and there's no way to re-enable it through the web interface. The way I've been recovering is resetting to factory defaults and then reconfiguring. It never occurred to me that my 5 year old might be pressing the button. If you're from Netgear and reading this, this is a terrible UI. I already sent one of these back because of this very issue. At the very least, give us the ability to disable these buttons.

Guess this is another reason for putting router up high as recommended on many posts/sites. 🙂