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Forum Discussion
Streaming from network devices stops due to constant DHCP lease renewal?
I've had nothing but trouble with the orbi system but mostly we have battled to a stalemate. The one remaining thing I can't tolerate is constant dropping of streams from Apple TV, Amazon Fire sticks...
Well, over the weekend I used the AppleTV quite a bit and didn't see connections drop. This means I'm going to consider the fix to my streaming issues to be the setting of 20/40Mhz Coexistence to 40Mhz only at least for firmware V2.2.1.210. If you also have this problem, I'd suggest you try that first.
Note that:
- 40Mhz is not great and Netgear should really make it so it can be set to 20Mhz only rather than 40Mhz only.
- Netgear should also actually fix whatever bug causes it to drop when switching so we can use the 20/40Mhz coexistence feature. I'll re-check after the next firmware release.
- I still see tons of other bugs: satellites disconnecting, inconsistent UI in the app vs. admin panel, etc... but I'll open new threads of discussion for them
- Despite the forum having plenty of "works for me" responses to complaints, I'd say that overall for me the Orbi has not been worth the trouble it has caused. A 5% problem rate would be really bad and still would mean that 95% of people are happy so every thread would be full of happy stories. Instead we see many issues and almost no means for users to fix, debug or help themselves other than stab randomly at the settings. You can't have Apple-level simplicity in the interface without a corresponding dedication to constraining the things that can go wrong, testing, and bug fixing. Netgear really needs to invest in and focus on reliability. Adding half-baked features makes the problem worse.
Well, I thought it was much better but I've had it drop an Apple Music stream twice within an hour here. My Apple TV is static assigned 10.0.0.8 here and you can see it reissue it:
[admin login] from source 10.0.0.10, Friday, November 30, 2018 15:18:45 [DHCP IP: 10.0.0.8] to MAC address c8:69:cd:39:89:bc, Friday, November 30, 2018 15:18:20 [DHCP IP: 10.0.0.5] to MAC address f8:62:14:0a:d7:f0, Friday, November 30, 2018 15:11:23 [DHCP IP: 10.0.0.12] to MAC address 20:7c:8f:4e:ba:9e, Friday, November 30, 2018 15:06:41 [DHCP IP: 10.0.0.6] to MAC address 00:cd:fe:18:b0:c3, Friday, November 30, 2018 15:06:25 [admin login] from source 10.0.0.10, Friday, November 30, 2018 14:59:38 [admin login] from source 10.0.0.10, Friday, November 30, 2018 14:59:35 [admin login] from source 10.0.0.10, Friday, November 30, 2018 14:59:18 [DHCP IP: 10.0.0.8] to MAC address c8:69:cd:39:89:bc, Friday, November 30, 2018 14:51:54
So... I guess better but still kinda messed up. I wonder if now it's due to 2.4 <---> 5GHz switching as others have reported. I need a better way to debug the DHCP server on this thing.
As a sanity check I used scapy to query DHCP and found only one response on my network... so it's likely not caused by a rouge DHCP server on the network unless it's popping in and out of the network somehow.
Received 21912 packets, got 1 answers, remaining 0 packets >>> ans.summary() Ether / IP / UDP 0.0.0.0:bootpc > 255.255.255.255:bootps / BOOTP / DHCP ==> Ether / IP / UDP 10.0.0.1:bootps > 255.255.255.255:bootpc / BOOTP / DHCP
Have you tried a full factory reset on the system and set up from scratch?
Set up some IP address reservations. I would change the IP address pool from default to .100. thru .200. Then add reservatsions for your devices.
Also power cycle your ISP modem OFF for 1 minute as well then back on.
Set manual wifi channels, 1, 6 and 11. Streaming should be happening over 5ghz if your not streaming wired.
I haven't tried a factory reset/setup from scratch on it yet. I already have set reservations for the Apple TV but I do actually want this to work with dynamic reservations as well... either way it doesn't help.
At this point I am going down the rabbit hole. I've telnetted into the thing and oddly the lease file it is supposed to be writing out in `/tmp/udhcpd.leases` is empty. The udhcpd configuration is set as:
pidfile /var/run/udhcpd.pid start 10.0.0.2 end 10.0.0.254 interface br0 remaining yes auto_time 5 lease_file /tmp/udhcpd.leases option subnet 255.255.255.0 option router 10.0.0.1 option dns 10.0.0.1 option lease 86400
However the lease file at /tmp/udhcpd.leases is empty even though its configured to be written every 5 seconds (seems agressive but whatever). I'm looking into why that would be now...
Lets try a factory reset and setup from scratch and change the default IP address pool as suggested...
Let us know how it goes.
