Orbi router pings netgear.com every ~6 seconds

[Umlautica]

I have no clue why this is necessary but it's jamming up my DNS logs in PiHole since it results in some 14k netgear.com lookups a day.

Maybe it's being used as a connectivity test?  I blocked the domain and the router still reports internet connectivity.  

I grabbed a pcap to see what was being sent and as far as I can tell it's just pings. It's 98B of data for each echo request/response so just for fun... (600/hr\*98bytes\*24h)\*2 bytes = 2.8MiB/day of data for every Orbi sold.

[jeraboom]

I am seeing the same behavior on my Orbi system. Besides the 2.8MB/day for the pings, there is also about 13MB/day being generated for the DNS queries that the Orbi does every time it pings www.netgear.com.  I have a support case open with Netgear saying that the router should be caching the DNS response for www.netgear.com, and also asking for the ability to turn off the "pinging" altogether.

[Umlautica]

fw 1.10.1.2 appears to have reduced the frequency that the Orbi pings netgear.com from every 6 seconds to ever 5 minutes.

[jeraboom]

Yes, I agree. Netgear kept bouncing me around to different people who kept asking for the same information (mostly completely irrelevant - like what kind of computer I was using) - it was obvious they had no idea what I was talking about. I finally told them that the new update has significantly reduced the problem.

[Retired_Member]

Their support is such a painstaking process. Same questions over and over and making you factory reset the router every other response.

[peteytesting]

i believe this is something netgear are activly working on

[OrbiMan]

They are trying to DDOS themselves using their products

[peteytesting]

sign , no they are working on rthe issue above with regard  to support