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Forum Discussion
HOW TO DISABLE 5G TEMPORARILY ON ORBI ROUTER
HELLO, I own an Orbi system and recently obtained a Personal Weather station that does direct uploads to various weather sites online. The weather station will only connect to Wi-Fi via a 2.4GHZ sys...
There seem to be a number of people having the same sort of issue lately. I believe the older firmware let you power off the radios, but the recent firmware does not. You can manually disable a specific interface on the command line, but there is an autmated watchdog process that will bring it back up again, usually within seconds.
I did work out a hacky way of temporarily downing the 5 GHz interface that might work for you:
- Shut off your satellites (otherwise, you need to repeat the following steps on all of them, in addition to router)
- Enable telnet on the router (from the /debug.htm page of the web interface)
- telnet to router
- After loggin in, run the following comand script on the command line (yes, 1 big line):
seconds=60; x=0; while [ $x -lt $seconds ]; do ip link set down dev $(config get wl5g_NORMAL_AP); x=$(( x + 1 )); echo "down $x"; sleep 1; done
This command will determine the interface for the primary 5 GHz, and shut it down for 60 seconds. If you want to change the amount of time that the interface stays down, simply change the "seconds=60" part of the script to whatever you want.
This doesn't make any permanent config changes, so if worse comes to worse, simply reboot the router and you should be right back to where you were.
Good luck!
!00% on the money!
After enabling Telnet - I used Putty to connect and just pasted the string below. I did increase it to 300 seconds (5 mins) just to make sure I was able to do everything on the setup La Crosse App (like scan the barcodes for the station and sensor).
Everything else is perfect. I willl be sending this to the La Crosse support since I have been working with them to resolve this issue.
guzzijason Thank you for finding this solution!
Im having the same issues with probably the exact same weather station. Can you provide either links or slightly more detailed info as it relates to the telnet into orbi router. I think i enabled telnet on my orbi router, but cant seem to figure out how to command line in from mac and run that script.
Any detailed help would be greatly appreciated as i get zero help from the weather station support.
Rcameron17 wrote:
Im having the same issues with probably the exact same weather station. Can you provide either links or slightly more detailed info as it relates to the telnet into orbi router. I think i enabled telnet on my orbi router, but cant seem to figure out how to command line in from mac and run that script.
Any detailed help would be greatly appreciated as i get zero help from the weather station support.
If you are on a mac, you open the Terminal application. Terminal provides a window with a command line prompt.
Enter the following telnet command on the Terminal command line: telnet 192.168.1.1
(You need to replace 192.168.1.1 with the IP address of your Orbi router.)
You will then see a login prompt from the Orbi.
Enter your Orbi router username (admin) and your password at the prompts. (admin/password is the default)
Now you will be logged into the Orbi and will have a command line on Orbi. The command line prompt should look like "root@RBR50:/#"
At the prompt, you enter the commands posted by guzzijason above all on one line: seconds=60; x=0; ... ; done
Press enter to execute the command.
When all finished, you enter the following command to log out from Orbi: exit
Hi, can i use this method to disable the 5hz band permanently?
I missed this question before, but no - it is not practical to try and use this as a permanent solution. There is some sort of watchdog process on the Orbi which is constantly checking the status of the interfaces, and bringing them back online if they happen to be shut down. This workaround fights against that watchdog, but you really wouldn't want to do that long-term.
ChihSiang wrote:
Hi, can i use this method to disable the 5hz band permanently?
I tried it twice but it gave me a syntax error, not sure why. unexpected "done"
You're missing the closing paren after "wl5g_NORMAL_AP", before the semicolon.
I'm trying this. When the script runs, should it run by repeting the line "down xx"?
This worked for me. Since I couldnt get the SSID's to change I tried this one to get my smart outlets connected to the 2.4. Worked very well! Thanks
Great solution, Kudos! I have a RBK50 and two RBW30 connected together to form a mesh system. Due to the evergreen wifi dropouts we've been hearing for a long time, I decided to separate the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz (using telnet) . I still couldn't figure out how to keep separate passwords for the two speeds? Anyone out there had any luck to do this using telnet?
Appreciate your feedbacks/experiences!!!
Can somebody please give me a tone down version for somebody who is not that saavy about commands etc. I see the instruction, but can't even figure out how to get to telnet and run the command. I am trying to connect Deebot device, and need to get my Orbi to provide 2.4 only. Please help
....telnet to router...
how do I do this?
What computer are you using? For Windows 10, see this:
Thanks so much for this information. I was able to get two Tan Tan Smart Sockets working tonight. Without this workaround I would have had to take them back.
worked like a charm
thank you man
Great solution.
Turning of the 5GHz SSID broadcast DOES NOT turn off the 5GHz radio! Disabling SSID broadcast is rather pointless - all it does it stop the router from announcing itsellf, but it DOES NOT prevent clients from still connecting to 5GHz. Some people do this for security (but its a placebo... no real security benefit from turning off SSID broadcast).
The ONLY method that I'm aware of to truly disable the 5GHz radio is the procedure I documented in post #2 on this thread. Once the 5GHz radio is disabled, your phone will have zero choice but to connect via 2.4GHz.
Devices remember the last wifi connection in there profiles. Thus will connect to the 5Ghz radio, even though the SSID has been hidden or disabled. We know this, however to get client side HW to connect to the 2.4Ghz radio, users have to tell the phone or pad to forget the current wifi network, then disable the wifi radio on the device then re-enable the wifi radio, then have the device re-connect to the SSID which will be only seen as the 2.4Ghz wifi radio. Input the password and the phone or pad will conect to the 2.4Ghz radios. This does work.
- When I run the code to disable 5g I consistently get an error code as follows unknown command “seconds=60”. Why am I getting this? It’s preventing the script from running. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
