My Nighthawk router is having a strange error, I'm starting to suspect a hardware issue. When it's been running for a while (~2 weeks) it seems to crash. When this happens, the internet connection is lost and I'm not able to access via Wifi anymore. However using a cable connection, I'm able to access my access point and other devices located on my home network so the actual switch in the router seems to work. But I'm unable to access the router via the web interface (it fails connecting), therefore I'm not able to catch any logs or see any status of the router when this issue happens.
During this summer, this issue happened more often. I suspect this is heat related since it was warmer inside at that time.
When this issue happens, the router is hot to the touch but the fan is not working. So far no firmware updates has resolved this issue for me (currently running latest 1.0.3.102).
Has anyone experienced anything similar and solved it? Otherwise I'll return this device as hardware faulty.
After route crash yesterday I've started to followup some KPIs in the router. It's been running for 24h.
One thing caught my eye, memory usage has increased from 385MB to 396MB. Maybe there's a memory leak in the router causing it to crash after 2 weeks. I'll keep monitor these values until next crash.
Today the router lost internet connectivity after 9 days of uptime (since last reboot). Acessing it via Wifi was impossible. Trying to renegotiate DHCP address didn't work, also physically disconnecting it from the incoming internet connection didn't work either. The logs didn't state any specific, except the time was off (back to september for some strange reason).
On the 5GHz Wifi channel it reported to be using "Xc h' h" which to me is a very strange channel. Second 5GHz looked normal.
Since last reboot the memory usage has increased from 385Mb to 437Mb.
Do note that the router runs on Linux and Linux caches as much memory as possible for increased performance. I can't tell you why your router is crashing/not functioning. All I can suggest is to do a full factory reset and reconfigure from scratch (do not use a backup settings file as it defeats the purpose of the reset). You say it gets hot and the fan doesn't want to spin. If so, you can get a cheap laptop cooler and let it blow at it. If it's really a hardware problem, you mmight request an RMA to NETGEAR
