Firmware V1.12.0.18 Discussion

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@TXGunLover wrote:

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scornwell wrote:
rexet The thing that gets me is they're aware of this thread, it's been pointed out to them multiple times and they've acknowledged it exists, but they've not acknowledged any of the issues and they've chosen, for some inexplicable reason, to stick their head in the sand instead of responding.

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It's definitely a difficult situation.  For some, 1.11.x broke so much functionality, and 1.12 has fixed all of that.  For my 90 devices, the Orbi is back to working like it did prior to the disaster that was 1.11.x.

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While I didn't find 1.11.x to be a disaster for me, if I ignore the inability to disable 2.4GHz. wireless radio (and prevent auto-update, which has been an ongoing problem), 1.12.x has been fine here. No new problems yet, and the wireless signal has been stronger. So all I really need to be happy with 1.12.x are a couple of simple pieces of functionality that are usually available in a router anyways. This should be a slam-dunk for Netgear, but once they head off in a particular direction, nothing seems to get their attention.

RogerSC I agree 100% with you, unfortunately the vision/direction Netgear is taking with Firmware is dictative (this is what you are getting take it or leave it) which to me is regression and myopic vision because one shoe does NOT fit all, everyone environment, needs, scenario is different.  unable to toggle auto updates to On/Off and unable to adjust radio power or turn off radio not being used so entire apartment complex or neighborhood is blasted by interference to meet seems poor Engineering decisions a step back, I am baffled a smart network company like Netgear being so myopic in thinking.

I try to be a bit more forgiving as I've worked for a couple of software companies. Sometimes we had to temporarily disable features after updates because we couldn't quickly locate what was going wrong. I suspect Netgear, despite their lack of statements, will add back radio control and maybe choice of auto updates. My sister just bought another Netgear router and she turned off 2.4ghz radio after seeing slowness to one device. So, I suspect Netgear will eventually add that back, if it's compatible with the Orbie backhaul feature.

v1.12 is working for me and meets my needs (thought I'd prefer to be able to turn off 2.4ghz), but if it doesn't, at some point, then I'm going to move on. I've learned not to wait around for fixes. Been burned too many times in my life.

It does seem to me, anyway, that it must be hard to find bugs before general release. Since 1.12 is working for some and not working for others. I have a hard time understanding why, but...

I started a thread for the RBK40 when FW 1.12.0.18 totally ruined my system, which was finally running smooth and stable on 1.11.0.20.  I had to do a factory reset and clean load of 1.11.0.20 to get my system stablized again.  In that thread you will see that Netgear just released FW 1.12.0.20.... coming soon to your system, like it or not.   

So far there is one post that it screwed up another person's RBK40 system.  I haven't had the misfortune of auto updating to the new FW.  At least by now I am an expert at doing a Factory Reset and clean install of 1.11.0.20. Doing a simple rollback didn't seem to work.  It will be interesting to see if the same pattern emerges of a new FW release fixing issues on the RB40 (AC2200) but causing problems on the RB50 (AC3000), then the next release fixes the problems with the 50 and screws up the 40.  Clearly one size doesn't fit all.  I expect to see more posts here once the update hits enough systems.  

Speaking of the Auto Update issue.  Does anyone know of a way to "Firewall" anything from Netgear before it can reach the Router?  It would be great to put on a "blocked list" to allow those of us who have finally reached stable performance from suffering with the forced updates.  Surely some of the people on here way smarter than me know of a way.  

DarrenM ChristineT 

Can we get anything from you guys or is dumping Orbi the only way to resolve these issues?

Running into problems with 1.12.0.18. We have the RBR50 and RBS50s. Certain clients started dropping off of our wireless pretty frequently and it is causing a huge disruption.
After the issues started showing up, I tried various configurations between router and sats. I have tried factory resetting all devices and force installing the new firmware update one at a time without any change. Tried turning off guest wifi and toggling beam forming & MuMIMO. WIth the same dropping problem. Even tried bringing the devices much closer with the same effect. I have my devices set in AP mode, i have tried toggling back and forth to force them into AP mode.I even tried getting on these wireless devices and doing a standard dhcp test on wireshark to esnure there arent any other conflicting dhcp servers and tried changing the password to be certain that there wasnt some lingering server. 
After pulling logs from the FIrewall and the devices, I was able to piece together some information.

It appears that the sats run into an IP conflict every hour so one sat is kicked and the devices connected through that have to wait for the sat to pull a new IP from the DHCP server/firewall. The lease time is 1 day, but the Orbi sats seem to always lease for one hour.  After that hour, it looks as though there is a problem through the lease and renew process where the sats fall back out of their assigned IP and try to self assign 192.168.1.250. where I have these devices statically assigned in the 192.168.128.2xx range from the DHCP server.  I also pulled a log on the sats where it started assigning the wirelessly connected devices to 192.168.1.xxx range before getting back to the DHCP server and then reassigning all of the IPs correctly.