I've looked everywhere and can't for the life of me work out where to submit a bug report to Netgear. They don't seem to be interested in allowing customer report bugs. Anyway...
I would like to report a bug with the Nighthawk AX5 RAX30 router. I've owned my Netgear Nighthawk RAX30 for about 7 months now and it has been solid as a rock. It is a great router. Currently on the latest Firmware Version V1.0.13.102_2.
In the last week or so I finally got around to setting up email notifications to send through the log triggered when it has reached full. I set up an App Password for my google gmail account and was successfully receiving the emails from the RAX30 router. We have up to 15 wired and wireless devices accessing the router daily, so the log doesn't take long to fill. It emailed approx once per day. BUT, ever since setting up the email notifications, on a daily basis the router's WIFI radios would shutdown/dropout and the web interface UI (routerlogin.net or 192.168.1.1) was no longer working or very very slow with the browser hour glass an almost permanent feature trying to log in. This would happen daily at different times.
I eliminated all other recent changes and the problem persisted. Finally remembering I had enabled email notifications recently, I disabled them completely and now the router is back to rock solid again. I believe there may be some sort of log buffer or memory overflow failure happening when email notifications are enabled and set to send log when full. It seems the full log and email it generates must be pushing the system over an edge that takes a reboot to come back from.
If anyone else has email notifications enabled when log is full and have to reboot their router daily, it may just be the email notifications causing your problems too. Netgear, please fix. The RAX30 is a great router, but since it clears the log daily, it would be nice to actually have email notfications working so I can keep a copy of the logs for audit/checking if something goes wrong without the router crashing.
Thanks for the tips but I couldn't follow your exact steps as the web page was different and didn't offer the same options. But I got onto "Chat" with an agent any way. All I wanted to do was report a bug as a concerned Customer of their product. Apparently my registered product only had 90 days of technical support and that has long expired. They offered to extend my support (at a cost I presume) so they could "assist" me. They closed the chat before I had a chance to respond within a few minutes. I give up with Netgear's useless support and reporting a problem.
Ever since turning off Email notifications the router has now been rock solid for 9 days. Prior to "testing" email notifications out, it was rock solid for approx 7 months. Definitely a problem in their firmware, but I can't be ar$ed chasing it up any further. My problem is fixed. Just don't use Email notifications on RAX30 routers.
If anyone else has email notifications enabled when log is full and have to reboot their router daily, it may just be the email notifications causing your problems too. Netgear, please fix.
It would be good to have that third party confirmation.
You could also try the previous firmware to see if that got hit too.
Another test would be the painful process of resetting and reconfiguring the router.
Netgear would need all those things checked to confirm that it is a bug and not some one-off configuration thing at your end.
Another variable to check would be the logging process and what you include. For example, if it fills with "Known DoS attacks and Port Scans", that is often full of false positives that you can safely ignore.
I assume that you have it set to send "When log is full". Have you tried "Hourly"?
Then there is the E-mail configuration. Gmail and Outlook, widely used SMTP servers, have been messing around with their settings. I gave up on GMail in favour of Outlook. Both have free options.
I wouldn't be surprised if both made it impossible for Netgear's routers to get through their defences before too long.
I've looked everywhere and can't for the life of me work out where to submit a bug report to Netgear. They don't seem to be interested in allowing customer report bugs. Anyway...
I would like to report a bug with the Nighthawk AX5 RAX30 router. I've owned my Netgear Nighthawk RAX30 for about 7 months now and it has been solid as a rock. It is a great router. Currently on the latest Firmware Version V1.0.13.102_2.
In the last week or so I finally got around to setting up email notifications to send through the log triggered when it has reached full. I set up an App Password for my google gmail account and was successfully receiving the emails from the RAX30 router. We have up to 15 wired and wireless devices accessing the router daily, so the log doesn't take long to fill. It emailed approx once per day. BUT, ever since setting up the email notifications, on a daily basis the router's WIFI radios would shutdown/dropout and the web interface UI (routerlogin.net or 192.168.1.1) was no longer working or very very slow with the browser hour glass an almost permanent feature trying to log in. This would happen daily at different times.
I eliminated all other recent changes and the problem persisted. Finally remembering I had enabled email notifications recently, I disabled them completely and now the router is back to rock solid again. I believe there may be some sort of log buffer or memory overflow failure happening when email notifications are enabled and set to send log when full. It seems the full log and email it generates must be pushing the system over an edge that takes a reboot to come back from.
If anyone else has email notifications enabled when log is full and have to reboot their router daily, it may just be the email notifications causing your problems too. Netgear, please fix. The RAX30 is a great router, but since it clears the log daily, it would be nice to actually have email notfications working so I can keep a copy of the logs for audit/checking if something goes wrong without the router crashing.
Thanks for the tips but I couldn't follow your exact steps as the web page was different and didn't offer the same options. But I got onto "Chat" with an agent any way. All I wanted to do was report a bug as a concerned Customer of their product. Apparently my registered product only had 90 days of technical support and that has long expired. They offered to extend my support (at a cost I presume) so they could "assist" me. They closed the chat before I had a chance to respond within a few minutes. I give up with Netgear's useless support and reporting a problem.
Ever since turning off Email notifications the router has now been rock solid for 9 days. Prior to "testing" email notifications out, it was rock solid for approx 7 months. Definitely a problem in their firmware, but I can't be ar$ed chasing it up any further. My problem is fixed. Just don't use Email notifications on RAX30 routers.
Definitely a problem in their firmware, but I can't be ar$ed chasing it up any further. My problem is fixed. Just don't use Email notifications on RAX30 routers.
Makes sense. Pointless faffing around with something as peripheral as this feature.
One question though, which email service were you using to send messages?
I have found that some work better than others. Some just don't work.
Another finding that sort of confirms your firmware suspicion is that I have tried email logs on a handful of devices. These routers don't all behave in the same way. Some are fine with GMail, others bomb out.
@michaelkenward wrote: Makes sense. Pointless faffing around with something as peripheral as this feature. One question though, which email service were you using to send messages?
I used Gmail and specifically set up an app password to get around their 2FA when sending via their SMTP (smtp.gmail.com) on port 465. The emails were getting through to Gmail fine. Using both a once off test "send log" and also with the scheduled "when log is full" notifications.
I did a little analysis of the logs by copying the content body into Notepad++ (text editor). I noticed they were exactly 1024 lines. So they have a log buffer (memory collection/list or internal file) limited to 1K lines. I also noticed when the router crapped itself after sending these emails, that it may have been busy at the time with receiving more log entries while attempting to copy the existing log entries, sending the email, clearing the log and starting over. The logs showed some of our household PC's tend to spam the router with requests such as:
... [UPnP set event: GetTotalBytesReceived] from source: 192.168.1.4, Sunday, June 30, 2024 06:12:48
[UPnP set event: GetTotalBytesSent] from source: 192.168.1.4, Sunday, June 30, 2024 06:12:48 <End of Log>
I noticed those UPnP requests would normally come in a flurry of 126 lines in the log in a couple of seconds. But the emailed logs would only have a smaller sub-set of those at the very end. So it was in the middle of receiving the flurry at the time of processing the email. I can only presume the router fails to double buffer and protect itself whilst sending, clearing and receiving new log entries. Just smells like a memory buffer overflow, or lack of wait states / multi-threaded unsafe operation handling causing the router to fault.
Those were my thoughts anyway. Nothing that Netgear's extended support costs would help me with haha.
