FVS318G Telnet LAN<>WAN firewall settings not working

[Muessigb]

Hello,

when logging into the router via telnet and accessing the fw / lan-wan settings, I cannot use the show function nor can I disable or enable any rules. I need this to work for an automated task that should change these parameters. It tells me that I provided too few parameters, however the show functions in the other routing virtual folders seem to work just fine without any additional arguments.

Am I missing something, or is there a way to contact Netgear so that they can finally fix this and some other issues in the firmware.

Or do I really have to build and flash OpenWrt and do my own, less buggy firmware?

Sincerely,

Benedikt

[DaneA]

Hi Muessigb,

I advise you to open an online case with NETGEAR Support at anytime.  Let them know about your concern for further assistance.

Regards,

DaneA
NETGEAR Community Team

[Muessigb]

But support is not free. It is quite sad seeing a company ask money for something they messed up in the first place.

[DaneA]

Hi Muessigb,

I understand how you feel about needing to pay for technical support whenever the support warranty has expired.  Kindly post an image or screenshot of the error message or the telnet session to your FVS318G so that others here in the community may post suggestions regarding your concern. 

What is the current firmware of your FVS318G? 

Regards, 
 

DaneA

NETGEAR Community Team 

[Muessigb]

Hello.

Thank you for your reply.

Here's an image of my Telnet session to the router. First, I went into fw/rules/lanWan/outbound and ran the 'show' command to display all the configured rules.

Then I went into the inbound rules and executed 'show' again. Unlike the first time, it works here and in all the other screens without any problems.

I am also not able to enable or disable any LAN<>WAN rules from within the Telnet console. The web UI has no problems doing so.

I am running the latest official firmware 3.1.1-18 from Netgear which is unfortunately from around 2014.

Regards,

Benedikt

[DaneA]

Hi Muessigb,

Can't see the image you have posted.  By the way, have you tried to perform a factory reset on the FVS318G then reconfigure it from scratch and check if you will encounter the same problem?

Regards,

DaneA

NETGEAR Community Team

[Muessigb]

Hello.

The image is hosted here: http://imgur.com/Dz1vmhL

If you cannot see it, I can try uploading it to my website instead.

No, I haven't recently resetted the router, but I do remember that the last reset fixed some problems such as the DHCP server not showing the devices anymore (in the groups manager). I don't think though, that this will fix this issue, but I can try at some point, although the entire network would have to be taken down, which is something that should really not be done as quite a few people will complain. Possibly overnight, though I am not a fan of this.

[DaneA]

Hi Muessigb,

Kindly try to perform a factory reset on your FVS318G then reconfigure it from scratch and check if same problem will occur.

I am not really familiar with the telnet access on the FVS318G because this is usually for the NETGEAR engineering team access.  There is no telnet / CLI reference guide published for the FVS318G unlike on some NETGEAR ProSAFE VPN Firewall like on the SRX5308 which you can check here.

Regards,

DaneA

NETGEAR Community Team

[Danthem]

I just set up a factory defaulted FVS318Gv1 here and tried. 

You are not able to do "show" in the /fw/rules/lanWan/outbound if there exists at least one outbound firewall rule. This seems to be a bit of a glitch indeed, however this device is very old so it's End of Life and out of support... No further firmwares will be released for it I am afraid.

I'd probably look in to an upgrade, the FVS318Gv1 is very old by now, the LAN-WAN throughput is according to the datasheet only 25Mbps which doesn't really hold up to today's standard and is not very 'future proof'.

A good replacement would be the FVS336Gv3, which also has 2 WANs allowing redundant Internet connections. It's probably a bit costier than the FVS318G was back in the days, another option would be the FVS318Gv2, although it's a bit old now and maybe not so future proof - but it will definitely outperform the one you have and it does have the newer version of CLI which is similar to the FVS336Gv(2,3) series and SRX5308.

Edit: Here is a link to a datasheet that compares the models FVS318Gv2, FVS318N, FVS336Gv3 and SRX5308.

[Muessigb]

Thank you so much for trying it out.

But wasn't the FVS318G supposed to get me 1 Gbit/s?

It says Gigabit Router?

The worst thing is, that this router isn't in use for long now. I bought it about a year ago to replace this incredibly old Netgear router we were using that was even too slow for our current 21 mbit/s internet connection that we are probably going to upgrade in the next month to a 120 mbit/s one.

Thank you for your suggestions. I will consider them eventually if we upgrade to the 120 mbit/s. Right now, everything is still usable, as in it works.

I could also look into openwrt as a firmware to replace this one. It could probably increase the speed some more and fix some bugs.

To not longer keep you tied, I will accept your answer. 

Although I still think it's a shame Netgear only offers a few months of support for their products, which is actually not even legal in this country. But I am not able to contract Netgear directly because of the lack of contact addresses.

[Danthem]

Hey again,

LAN-LAN is gigabit, LAN-WAN throughput  is a bit more limited.

FVS318Gv1 is pretty old, the oldest firmware I can find online is from 2010 and I'm not even sure that's the initial firmware for it but firmware was supported and updated for at least 4 years. It's weird that a reseller would sell you that model so recently especially since the V2 has been around since 2014. 

Device comes with 90 days of setup support where you can get help with getting the device up and running, after that you will need a support contract for that kind of service. It does however not affect the hardware warranty of the unit, in case of a hardware failure you're covered by the hardware warranty which is longer. 

 But yeah, the ability to list outbound rules over CLI I guess is not the most important feature, so if it performs good enough for your usage then there's not really any point in upgrading at this stage I guess (other than future proofing the setup a bit), at least we have ruled out that this would be a specific issue on your unit / with your config.

[Muessigb]

Could it be that I have the v2 model.

I really do not know anymore.

The software is from 2014 and I bought the router in 2015.

I can provide a serial number or something in case somebody can tell me what model I actually have. It just says FVS318G on the front and back. Nothing more.

The list feature is not that important but the DHCP server's devices don't show up in the lan groups anymore. 

I already opened a topic, although I haven't gotten any solution yet. It's just another software bug it seems.

I might just go ahead and build myself openwrt and flash it.

Given that that outperforms the stock firmware anyways is this probably the best way to go.

[Danthem]

Based on the CLI output you're getting and firmware version you are running, you definitely have the V1. 

Just for reference, this is what an example setup would look like in the v2:

http://i.imgur.com/gahRWLl.png

[Muessigb]

Thank you, I see.

Would you recommend using OpenWrt as the main firmware?

I used OpenWrt on a few Netgear routers already and it seems to work fine. Do you have any ideas if it will affect performance?

EDIT:

Openwrt is not supported unfortunately.

That complicates things by a lot.

I just wonder why it wouldn't work. The device seems to be powerful enough and Linux is apparently working.

Netgear must provided the sources to the Linux that is running as a download because of GPL requirements.

[Danthem]

Never tried OpenWRT on the business routers, only some old home router so I wouldn't be much help there I'm afraid.

Source can be found here:

http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/2649/~/netgear---open-source-code-for-programmers-(gpl...

And for the FVS318G, FW 3.1.1-18:

http://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GPL/FVS318_V3.1.1-18_src.zip

cheers!

[Muessigb]

<p>Thank you! This is really helpful. We just got an offer from our ISP for an upgrade to 120 Mbit/s for a very reasonable price and we will very likely be upgrading soon.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>This means that the old router has to go as 25 mbit/s aren't enough anymore obviously. How is the FVS318Gv2 200.</p>
<p>Amazon reviews are rather unsatisfied with it for crashing too often (especially loosing configuration).</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Being a hobbyist, I was also looking into the BananaPi Router which seems to be a quite powerful platform. Does anybody have sub 200 euro recommendations for me?</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Cheers!&nbsp;</p>

[Danthem]

Personally I'm a big fan of he FVS336gv3.. It's around 200 I'd guess, especially if you can find some discount. I can see Amazon reviews are not too amazing but they are very few and as someone who deals with a whole bunch of them I think they're great.

Banana-pi is definitely an interesting piece, I've been eyeing one for myself at home but I would probably not implement a b-pi based solution in a business Network.. It all comes down to what the requirements are though, in some scenarios it would be fine I guess 🙂

[Muessigb]

Thank you for your suggestion.

So finally I decided in favor of the PC-Engines APU.1D4 router which can route 400-500 Mbit/s, has 4 GB DDR3 RAM, a dual core AMD processor at 1 GHz and a 16 GB server-grade SSD. It also has 3 gigabit Ethernet interfaces that are connected through PCI-Express.

It will be running pfSense.