Both my router and satellite are still working on V3.2.10.11. Since my disconnecting devices and apps are not essential, I am afraid to do any firmware changes in this National emergency situation to further screw up my internet connection. My son is doing his important graduate school work from his new Macbook pro laptop with no problems.
I wonder, if there is a power outage, what firmware version will be installed after restart and is that firmware stable?
Re: RBR850 Frequent Disconnects Starting March 9th AM EST
How do you "Check your CTS and RTS values, if the are at 64, you might want to set them to 2347. If things are working at 64, leave it." I can connect to the router and login in but I cannot find where to check these settings.
I now have another problem that for whatever reason my devices (witnesses multiple times on my Iphone and Ipad) seem to lose internet connectivity completely. Only a WIFI disconnect and reconnect connects them back online.
......
@Rogue_Ai, I saw the same issue previously when I used v3.1.5.x early after the release of Orbi AX.
The issue was caused by the instability of the 2.4 GHz band. To confirm this, and as a test, please try to switch off all your devices working on the 2.4 GHz band and see if you will see the issue?
What I did to overcome this issue at that time was to connect an old Apple Airport router wired to Orbi as an AP and moved all my 2.4 GHz devices to the Apple Airport. 🙂
Re: RBR850 Frequent Disconnects Starting March 9th AM EST
Hey guys.
Frequent browser, first time poster. I’ve been kind of following this thread because I’ve been having the same problems. But I have stumbled upon something for my set up that I want to share just in case it helps anyone. Obviously this is with a grain of salt, but you never know. I just stumbled upon it.
So like many of you, I have gone to the new system from one of the older generations. Everything was fine until about a week ago. Then I started running into the disconnects. I followed every single suggestion in this thread to the letter. Nothing really seemed to help.
A few areas that I was really leaning towards: 1) DDOS/DOS attack based upon modem and router logs. 2) Windows 10 networking issues based upon isolated complaints from recent cumulative updates. 3) Malware infection due to recently published vulnerabilities.
Re: RBR850 Frequent Disconnects Starting March 9th AM EST
I’m not sure why my post submitted before I was finished, but here’s the rest.
When I connected my older system back into my router, my problems seemingly went away. I wasn’t able to get anything working properly with firmware downgrades or with resets, etc.
However, after a day or two my old router began experiencing the same exact disconnects. And it was still on an older version of the firmware. I tried resetting that one and got it working for an hour until it started disconnecting again. That one was the RBR40 running 2.3.5.0.
I ended up hooking up the RBR850 again and doing a very religious reset after manually installing 3.2.10.11. First I reset from the configuration page, then telnet, and finally with the manual reset button. I wanted to take no chances that something was still funky.
Weirdly enough, I stumbled upon the realization that the system was not playing nicely with devices if they were set up using a static IP or with DHCP coming through another device, such as a home server. Using the router as DHCP cleared up a lot of my issues. But I was still dropping Pings approximately every 6.2 minutes on each WiFi band according to the PRTG Network Monitor I installed. The drops reduced a little bit when hardwired, but not by much.
I again reset the RBR850. And this time it changed the CTS/RTS Threshold back to 64. I noticed at that level that my ping graphs leveled out somewhat. So instead of having huge peaks and valleys for response time, it started leveling out to a more consistent amount.
Playing with it a little more, I tested lowering that threshold to 25, which I know is low. Now my pin times to the router are nearly consistent, only varying by about 1 ms on Wi-Fi. Since making these changes, I have had no connection drops at all. it has been logging for nearly 3 hours now and my connection seems to be stable.
To recap:
I’m not really sure why my old router started experiencing the same disconnects even though the firmware version was still the version from July 2019. Malware?
Resetting the device and downgrading never seemed to work. But when I reset the device in three different ways before setting it up again, it seemed to be much more stable, even with the latest troubled firmware.
It did not seem to like the fact that it was not servicing clients itself with DHCP. (Reduce the frequency of disconnects by about half.)
It seems to love the lowered CTS/RTS Threshold. (Totally eliminated disconnects)
I know some of my stuff, but I’m not a network engineer. Why all these things I did seem to be working, I do not know. But I seem to be sitting pretty right now.
Maybe this will get someone thinking about how these different things work together so that we can survive until Netgear fixes it.
Re: RBR850 Frequent Disconnects Starting March 9th AM EST
You might have narrowed it down, the router might be confused with external DHCP, and that could explain why I'm having problems with wired backhaul in AP mode (DHCP server is on another router).
@Wombatmatty wrote: I’m not sure why my post submitted before I was finished, but here’s the rest.
When I connected my older system back into my router, my problems seemingly went away. I wasn’t able to get anything working properly with firmware downgrades or with resets, etc.
However, after a day or two my old router began experiencing the same exact disconnects. And it was still on an older version of the firmware. I tried resetting that one and got it working for an hour until it started disconnecting again. That one was the RBR40 running 2.3.5.0.
I ended up hooking up the RBR850 again and doing a very religious reset after manually installing 3.2.10.11. First I reset from the configuration page, then telnet, and finally with the manual reset button. I wanted to take no chances that something was still funky.
Weirdly enough, I stumbled upon the realization that the system was not playing nicely with devices if they were set up using a static IP or with DHCP coming through another device, such as a home server. Using the router as DHCP cleared up a lot of my issues. But I was still dropping Pings approximately every 6.2 minutes on each WiFi band according to the PRTG Network Monitor I installed. The drops reduced a little bit when hardwired, but not by much.
I again reset the RBR850. And this time it changed the CTS/RTS Threshold back to 64. I noticed at that level that my ping graphs leveled out somewhat. So instead of having huge peaks and valleys for response time, it started leveling out to a more consistent amount.
Playing with it a little more, I tested lowering that threshold to 25, which I know is low. Now my pin times to the router are nearly consistent, only varying by about 1 ms on Wi-Fi. Since making these changes, I have had no connection drops at all. it has been logging for nearly 3 hours now and my connection seems to be stable.
To recap:
I’m not really sure why my old router started experiencing the same disconnects even though the firmware version was still the version from July 2019. Malware?
Resetting the device and downgrading never seemed to work. But when I reset the device in three different ways before setting it up again, it seemed to be much more stable, even with the latest troubled firmware.
It did not seem to like the fact that it was not servicing clients itself with DHCP. (Reduce the frequency of disconnects by about half.)
It seems to love the lowered CTS/RTS Threshold. (Totally eliminated disconnects)
I know some of my stuff, but I’m not a network engineer. Why all these things I did seem to be working, I do not know. But I seem to be sitting pretty right now.
Maybe this will get someone thinking about how these different things work together so that we can survive until Netgear fixes it.
Re: RBR850 Frequent Disconnects Starting March 9th AM EST
No external DHCP here either. Tried every setting possible and went back to my RB50 system. Sure enough, when I reconnected that system did a FW upgrade. Now that system shows 0 satellites and 0 connected devices despite my entire network being up. Just waiting for Best Buy to open to go get an Eero Pro system. I'm done trying to spend my time fixing these issues.
Re: RBR850 Frequent Disconnects Starting March 9th AM EST
Utterly ridiculous, now I rolled back my RB50 router and satellite to 2.3 from 2.5 and sure enough all my satellites and devices are back. So it's not just the latest .AX firmware, it's like all the latest firmware is just garbage.
Re: RBR850 Frequent Disconnects Starting March 9th AM EST
Bumping this for folks who may not have seen it... this WORKS. It's only a workaround until they fix that crappy firmware release but it'll get you up and running. Make sure to check the "Always" box as well.
After adding updates1.netgear.com to the blocked sites list my RBR850 was no longer able to reach out for updates last night and is still sitting on 3.1.5.23. The only wacky thing is that the RBS (satellite) did manage to reach out and has upgraded to 3.2.9.2. That doesn't appear to be an issue because I have not experienced dropped connections with the satellite on this version.
For those of you who want to try this and you are using your Orbi in router mode, all you will need to do is:
1) In the Advanced\Security\Block Sites page add a keyword for updates1.netgear.com (make sure to hit the apply button in the upper right after adding the keyword).
2) Revert your RBR850 firmware to 3.1.5.23.
3) Confirm you are still seeing updates1.netgear.com on the Block Sites page.
4) Click on Administration\Firmware Update and wait a few moments. You should see the web GUI say that the service is unreachable under the status column for the RBR850.
If you are using the Orbi in AP mode the same principal applies, but you will need to add updates1.netgear.com to the blocked sites on your upstream router rather than the Orbi.
I hope this helps people get on with their digital lives while netgear figures out what they have broken.
Interesting is the NTP find in this thread. I went and checked, sure enough NTP was out of sync. Corrected and 4 of my IOT cameras were able to connect again. I don't know if it is coincidence or not, really grasping at straws but it's a simple thing for others to check. Also, what DNS settings are ppl seeing on their .AX systems?
Re: RBR850 Frequent Disconnects Starting March 9th AM EST
Just to clarify… The DHCP server was only part of my solution. There were several things that I did. But the DHCP server was the first thing that I did that really seemed to have an impact on the clients being recognized by the router. Prior to setting the router as the DHCP server, the router was “losing” devices in the attached devices menu. That’s what I meant by it wasn’t playing nicely with my DHCP server. But that’s what at least got my devices to be solidly recognized and not disconnected, especially the satellite.
I think the way that I reset the device as well as the fragment size were much more important. Resetting the device with just one method didn’t really seem to have any impact on performance or reliability. But when I reset it using the interface, then Telenet, and finally the reset button, things got a LOT better. It’s almost as if things were not being cleared out during a single reset.
Considering how much I’ve looked at this over the last 24 hours, I think the fragment size might be the MOST important, especially if you have a lot of devices. It’s almost as if the router is not properly utilizing this setting, especially since I don’t have any discernible packet collisions or fragmented packets from either the router status page or any of my network traces. Setting it to a very low figure does seem to fix the issues. That’s when I noticed that my ping times were leveling out to more of a straight line on the graph as opposed to the worlds tallest roller coaster. That’s also when I noticed zero connection drops and zero lost packets.
Granted there are still some other minor connection issues with certain types of devices, but I have a feeling that’s more of a blocked connection issue. In any case, it’s much better than it was. I’m currently tracking down whether the router is blocking certain port traffic to an iPhone, even though the security page is set to never restrict any ports or devices. For example, a wireless light switch shows connected and is available via a web interface. But it is showing as off-line when using an iPhone and the associated app. Same thing with nest thermostats and ring cameras. Of course, if I come across anything profound I will post it. And I have forwarded my info off to Netgear, but I’m not expecting a response and I’m not even expecting them to read it before Christmas.
Re: RBR850 Frequent Disconnects Starting March 9th AM EST
Just curious if you have tried putting the RBR into AP mode since you have a DHCP server already existing on your network. Does this change any behaviors? Having two DHCP servers on the same network would be problematic I presume.
@Wombatmatty wrote: Just to clarify… The DHCP server was only part of my solution. There were several things that I did. But the DHCP server was the first thing that I did that really seemed to have an impact on the clients being recognized by the router. Prior to setting the router as the DHCP server, the router was “losing” devices in the attached devices menu. That’s what I meant by it wasn’t playing nicely with my DHCP server. But that’s what at least got my devices to be solidly recognized and not disconnected, especially the satellite.
I think the way that I reset the device as well as the fragment size were much more important. Resetting the device with just one method didn’t really seem to have any impact on performance or reliability. But when I reset it using the interface, then Telenet, and finally the reset button, things got a LOT better. It’s almost as if things were not being cleared out during a single reset.
Considering how much I’ve looked at this over the last 24 hours, I think the fragment size might be the MOST important, especially if you have a lot of devices. It’s almost as if the router is not properly utilizing this setting, especially since I don’t have any discernible packet collisions or fragmented packets from either the router status page or any of my network traces. Setting it to a very low figure does seem to fix the issues. That’s when I noticed that my ping times were leveling out to more of a straight line on the graph as opposed to the worlds tallest roller coaster. That’s also when I noticed zero connection drops and zero lost packets.
Granted there are still some other minor connection issues with certain types of devices, but I have a feeling that’s more of a blocked connection issue. In any case, it’s much better than it was. I’m currently tracking down whether the router is blocking certain port traffic to an iPhone, even though the security page is set to never restrict any ports or devices. For example, a wireless light switch shows connected and is available via a web interface. But it is showing as off-line when using an iPhone and the associated app. Same thing with nest thermostats and ring cameras. Of course, if I come across anything profound I will post it. And I have forwarded my info off to Netgear, but I’m not expecting a response and I’m not even expecting them to read it before Christmas.
Interesting is the NTP find in this thread. I went and checked, sure enough NTP was out of sync. Corrected and 4 of my IOT cameras were able to connect again. I don't know if it is coincidence or not, really grasping at straws but it's a simple thing for others to check. Also, what DNS settings are ppl seeing on their .AX systems?
Re: RBR850 Frequent Disconnects Starting March 9th AM EST
Yes, disabled DST, manually set my time as it was off by 1 hour and applied. Already saw device count increase by 4 so some devices might not have liked time being out of sync...
Again, I'm grasping at straws here but it was an interesting find especially seeing users on the older .AC systems are having the same issues...
Yes, disabled DST, manually set my time as it was off by 1 hour and applied. Already saw device count increase by 4 so some devices might not have liked time being out of sync...
Again, I'm grasping at straws here but it was an interesting find especially seeing users on the older .AC systems are having the same issues...
I've also seen NTP (and therefore DHCP) related issues. In AP mode, using a fixed address for the Orbi somehow broke the ability for Orbi to be able to get time via NTP. It put the internal DHCP server Orbi uses for the guest network back in 2019, and no device could connect, I suspect they couldn't get a proper lease given the discrepency between the devices and Orbi clocks. I had to put the Orbi on DHCP in AP mode to get Orbi to get its clock sync'ed properly.
Quite frankly, I kinda wish they would scrap their current firmware, and start from scratch. I moved on, too many bugs they're relying on users to fix. My Orbi is too old for Amazon to take it back, so I'll have to go through other recourses to get my money back.
Re: RBR850 Frequent Disconnects Starting March 9th AM EST
Weirdly... my older Orbi with firmware from July 2019 (no more recent update being pushed) also started developing issues after I went back to it. So if nothing got updated on that one, is it possible there might be some kind of malware? I know these firmware updates are being pushed because of vulnerabilities. Similarly, system resets on that device correct the issue... for a short time. But otherwise, everything on that older Orbi was exactly as it has been for the past 2+ years. Gets ya wondering, right? Because why would an older system on old firmware develop the same / similar symptoms?
Re: RBR850 Frequent Disconnects Starting March 9th AM EST
Depends if it is something that is common to all platforms a'la NTP breaking which is around when most of these issues seem to be popping up. I'm just using that as an example but if it is a feature common to all NG's firmware then it could affect all models. My older unit did indeed update it's firmware which broke a number of things but after reverting back I still couldn't get all my devices connected until I changed that NTP setting on my older unit.
Re: RBR850 Frequent Disconnects Starting March 9th AM EST
I just checked my NTP settings and the time on the router and everything looked fine. Plus, this issue didn't start until 3/9 when the new firmware was pushed. It doesn't look like this is the cause of my issues.
