Orbi Voice and kkbox

[jrpmcafee]

I got an Orbi Voice in June and its working fine, but I was going through my network logs and found that it is pinging account.kkbox.com almost constantly.  From what I can tell, kkbox is a music streaming service available in Asia.  The Orbi Voice can use kkbox as a service when in Asia, but not in America, so I don't understand why it would be constantly pinging it.

I blacklisted the site so that the address doesn't resolve and have not noticed any change in functionality of the Voice functionality.

Looking for any insight.

[Blanca_O]

Hi @jrpmcafee

Do you have the latest firmware (2.3.5.14) in your Orbi Voice Satellite (RBS40V)? Checking on the firmware release notes, new feature and enhancement added is it supports the KKBOX service in the Asia-Pacific region. 

https://kb.netgear.com/000061162/RBS40V-Firmware-Version-2-3-5-14

Do you experience any irregularities or connectivity issue with the RBS40V?

Regards, 
Blanca 
Community Team

[jrpmcafee]

I do have the latest firmware and likely that's why there are the calls to kkbox, but since I'm in North America where the service isn't available, I am wondering why I wouldn't be able to turn off that feature.

Not experiencing connectivity issues, but I am disconcerted that there have been 750,000 queries from the device in the past week.

[DrPepper73]

I've got a static IP address at home, and I'm using OpenDNS; this gives me the chance to see a nice dashboard with statistics.

I have noticed that there's a huge number of DNS requests to account.kkbox.com domain (more than 30K per day).

Now ... I'm in Italy, where kkbox is not available.

I got crazy to find out who was responsible for all those requests, I had to manually enable DNS logging on my router, and unplug all the devices one by one until the requests did not stop (there were more or less 4 each 2 seconds).

My RBS40V is on firmware V2.3.5.14, and I think that more than 30K per each day ... is really a HUGE number.

Where's the need to contact a service that it's not even available?

Is there a way to avoid this?

[jrpmcafee]

I'm glad to have some company.  I have been looking and still haven't found an answer.  I've been able to blacklist the site so that the DNS doesn't resolve and haven't seen any change in the functionality of the Orbi.

I am willing to bet it's sloppy code that doesn't have an end to the login call in the event of no account.  But I'd love to see it cleaned up if only so that it takes the spam out of my dashboard.

[DrPepper73]

I think we both are in good company. Most probably every single owner of RBS40V has the same issue, without being aware.

Problem is that it's very difficult to notice those 30-40K queries everyday (I wouldn't have noticed without OpenDNS dashboard).

Furthermore, even once noticed, it's difficult to find out where they come from.

I think that the only solution is to wait for the next firmware release.

[freibooter]

Europe here. I just setup AdGuard Home on my network and discovered the same issue.

Literally one query every two seconds. This is insane.

60% of all DNS queries on my network are to   account.kkbox.com.

How does this even happen and why does nobody care about fixing this?

I think my Orbi Voice will end up on eBay sooner rather than later. It has been a constantsource of annoyance anyways - it 's range detection is completely broken as well, constantly reponding to queries to  a regular Echo in the other room  unless I'm right next to it, then the other Echo responds ...

[freibooter]

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@jrpmcafee wrote:

I blacklisted the site so that the address doesn't resolve and have not noticed any change in functionality of the Voice functionality.

Oh, great ... blacklisting the address results in 8 blocked queries per seconds vs one successful one every two seconds ...  

[DrPepper73]

I think we need to wait for the next firmware update.

[DrPepper73]

New firmware has been released.

As per my understanding, this should fix the issue:

https://kb.netgear.com/000061410/RBS40V-Firmware-Version-2-3-6-4-Orbi-Mode-for-Orbi