Satellite RBS50 - Solid White Light

[merlin309]

MyOrbi system (RBR50 & 1 RBS50) has been running well for about a year.  Got back from vacation and found the satellite was no longer talking to the router. Various reboots later, still nothing.  Upon power up, the ring goes solid white, and that's it.

Reset only works when powering on with the reset switch pressed.  Pressing the reset switch when the satellite is already on does nothing.

To my somewhat knowledgeable eye, it seems as if the CPU is locking up shortly after booting.

The router is running V2.0.0.74.  Apparently it updated while we were gone.  That would be my top guess as the cause of the failure.

It's obviously out of warranty, so it seems NetGear won't talk to me without me paying them more money.  And my pessimistic side believes they are going to say, "sorry.  You need to replace it".  Not going to happen, especially if it's because of a firmware update.  That leaves the community here as my only option.  Hopefully someone has an idea how to get it going again.  For example, is there any way to connect to the satellite directly to try to reload the firmware?  That all I can think of to do.  Otherwise, time to spend my cash again, on something that will work longer than a year 😞

Thanks for any ideas you might have,

Mark

[st_shaw]

I assume you've tried to re-pair the sat, tried to connect to sat via an Ethernet cable and log into the GUI, verified the sat FW matches the router, etc.

If you've done all that and the sat is bricked, then you could search on here for usng TFTP to reload firmware on Netgear routers.  I've used it to unbrick other Netgear routers, but never had to do it with Orbi.

[merlin309]

Thanks for the suggestions...

I've re-paired many, many times, moved the satellite within 5 feet of the router, with no luck.  I still just get a very dim nightlight 😞

I connected an ethernet cable between the computer and the satellite.  The only way I get a network connection is to reboot the satellite with the reset button pressed until the power light turns orange.  The computer then sees a network come and go about 5 or 6 times, until the network stays.

The computer got the default address of 169.254.13.89, and of course I have no idea what the satellite IP address is.  So I downloaded and installed a dchp service and tried again.  But still no clue, and every address on the subnet I tried pinging it came back with Destination host unreachable, and every address I tried looking for the GUI failed too (though I didn't try all 255 other addresses!)

Admittedly my networking skills aren't at the pro level (I'm just a really experience software developer), but I kind of think I need an IP address on the satellite before I can try anything else, and it appears I can't even get that.

Mark

[st_shaw]

Set your computer to a static IP, like 192.168.1.10. You could try 192.168.1.250 as the default IP for the router IP and see if that works.

TFTP instructions here:  https://kb.netgear.com/22688/How-to-upload-firmware-to-a-NETGEAR-router-using-TFTP

[merlin309]

So I wrote a program (I mentioned I was a software developer, right?) to try all 256 addresses under 192.168.1.n.  Each and every address came back with a timeout error. I would expect a web interface to be looking at port 80, right?  Is there another port to try?

I'll try it again right after a reset to see if that works any better, but I'm not holding out much hope...

Thanks for the suggestions,

Mark

[st_shaw]

TFTP is port 69, and is UDP not TCP.

The default IP on other Netgear routers is 192.168.1.1, but others have reported seeing the sats come up using 192.168.1.250, so that's why I said to try that.