[R7800] Will no longer save settings after reboot.

[verbage]

I thought i was the only one. My router factory reset itself. I thought someone hacked my router and reset it. So we should not reboot the router at this time? It happened after i updated to the latest firmware V1.0.2.74.4SF. The ones before that were ok. Anyone knows the resolution yet?

For me, I was running V1.0.2.74.1SF when it happened, and I used the opportunity to upgrade to V1.0.2.74.4SF--so at least in my case it could not be due to V1.0.2.74.4SF. But I feel bad mentioning these things together because some people might not read on, and might take it wrong. But to be clear, I do not think it has anything to do with the firmware that is used--it is a hardware problem--and even though we have several reports, I suspect it is just a matter of coincidence. Indeed, as I searched more, I found abundant references about similar happenings with other Netgear routers, not only the R7800. Perhaps Netgear uses a lower quality brand of flash vs. other manufacturers (like Asus?), or maybe they treat the NVRAM differently by writing to it more frequently? I don't know--this is all speculation on my part.

Regarding rebooting your router, up to you. In my case, if I do not reboot, it maintains the settings. In my case, it takes about ~15 minutes to get things where I want it because there are lengthy pauses everytime you apply a change. If settings could be saved and restored, that would really help mitigate things, and almost make this situation tolerable. But at least in my case, the save and restore of settings does not seem to work with the NVRAM gimped...

 

[verbage]

Wow, I picked the Advance Ground RMA for $16.90 given that direct shipping for a Standard Swap would have been close to that price anyways, and I unexpectedly received my replacement R7800 today. I am also very happy because it is a full retail box in shrinkwrap--not a refurbed white box item.

 

[L&LD]

@verbage glad you're happy and hope this one lasts a very long time for you.

With regards to shrinkwrap, I too used to think that 'original shrinkwrap' meant a brand new unit. I know better now. Many places (for good or bad) can re-shrinkwrap returned goods and make them look 'like new', from most OEM manufacturers.

 

[verbage]

With regards to shrinkwrap, I too used to think that 'original shrinkwrap' meant a brand new unit. I know better now. Many places (for good or bad) can re-shrinkwrap returned goods and make them look 'like new', from most OEM manufacturers.

Ooops, I had not thought of that... After opening it, it does look completely new to me, but who knows. One thing I note is that this unit+box is has a specific serial number (they match), and I remember reading someplace that refurbs are devoid of serial numbers. But I could be remembering that wrong. Whatever the case, I am pleased that it arrived so quickly, and here's to hoping it will last more than 11 months like my first one!

 

[L&LD]

Unit+box serial numbers matching isn't hard if someone returns the complete packaging.

Is the warranty 12 months or 24 (or longer) for your router? It may be worthwhile to ask for an extension, if possible (and if needed).

 

[verbage]

Is the warranty 12 months or 24 (or longer) for your router? It may be worthwhile to ask for an extension, if possible (and if needed).

Not even that The one-year anniversary date on my original R7800 was the the middle of next month. So with this RMA replacement, they have not extended the warranty a full year--they have just given me the remainder of my original warranty, i.e. less than one month. Thanks for the suggestion about asking for an extension--I might do that, but I'm sure that if this is their policy, they will not alter for me.

 

[tommytqt]

Me too. Mine expires next month so i called them (OMG 1h30 wait time) to get the RMA. Netgear has 1, yes ONE, technician to help the whole America. The reason i know because i called in with 2 phones. After i was done with the first one, the same guy started answering me on the other phone. He is from India or somewhere. I could hear the rooster in the backgroud. OMG.
I paid $16.99 for Advance shipping. It will be here on Monday.

 

[HELLO_wORLD]

Same exact problem here. No rhyme no reason.
It is more than a coincidence...
Concomitantly, I noticed that « net-wall restart » is called every 3 seconds!!!! There to no reason why it suddenly did that.

 

[spocko]

This is just a shot in the dark, but frequent writes to flash memory can cause the memory to fail after a while. Are there any logs or other frequently-written files that are stored in flash on this router? It looks like /var is linked to /tmp, so most logs are in temporary storage. Don't know if there is anything else.

 

[HELLO_wORLD]

This is just a shot in the dark, but frequent writes to flash memory can cause the memory to fail after a while. Are there any logs or other frequently-written files that are stored in flash on this router? It looks like /var is linked to /tmp, so most logs are in temporary storage. Don't know if there is anything else.

This is an interesting thought. I would be interesting to know if other people with this factory reset on reboot also have a net-wall restart every 3 seconds. This is clearly involving a lot of I/O as it flushes and recreates all iptables each time!
Before this problem appeared, net-wall restart was barely never called (less than once a day).
Something changed in the router settings causing that. The fact that it is happening to many of us around the same time period (a few days apart) is not a coincidence. So what is it and how did that spread into our setups?
Would be nice to find a solution... Any idea on how to figure out what is calling net-wall restart so often?

 

[microchip]

This is an interesting thought. I would be interesting to know if other people with this factory reset on reboot also have a net-wall restart every 3 seconds. This is clearly involving a lot of I/O as it flushes and recreates all iptables each time!
Before this problem appeared, net-wall restart was barely never called (less than once a day).
Something changed in the router settings causing that. The fact that it is happening to many of us around the same time period (a few days apart) is not a coincidence. So what is it and how did that spread into our setups?
Would be nice to find a solution... Any idea on how to figure out what is calling net-wall restart so often?

I've never seen net-wall restart every 3 seconds on my R7800. It does so every 5 minutes or so. Recreating iptables is done in memory. It reads the values from flash chip but otherwise does not write to them, unless instructed

 

[L&LD]

Maybe it is an arbitrary issue like the following link where enterprise-grade SSDs were programmed to just 'die' at 40,000 hours?

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15673/dell-hpe-updates-for-40k-hour-essd-failures

 

[kamoj]

Add e.g. this code to the net-wall script in Voxels code:

CALLER="`ps w | grep $PPID | grep -v grep`"
echo "`date` $PWD :$CALLER: Calling net-wall $* : ${0##*/} $$ " >>/net-wall-log.txt

Any idea on how to figure out what is calling net-wall restart so often?

 

[HELLO_wORLD]

Add e.g. this code to the net-wall script in Voxels code:

CALLER="`ps w | grep $PPID | grep -v grep`"
echo "`date` $PWD :$CALLER: Calling net-wall $* : ${0##*/} $$ " >>/net-wall-log.txt

Thank you @kamoj
Here is the result:

Tue Mar 31 10:35:55 GMT 2020 / :24533 root        400 S   /bin/sh -c /usr/sbin/net-wall restart : Calling net-wall restart : net-wall 24534
Tue Mar 31 10:35:58 GMT 2020 / :24660 root        400 S   /bin/sh -c /usr/sbin/net-wall restart : Calling net-wall restart : net-wall 24661
Tue Mar 31 10:36:00 GMT 2020 / :24817 root        400 S   /bin/sh -c /usr/sbin/net-wall restart : Calling net-wall restart : net-wall 24818
Tue Mar 31 10:36:03 GMT 2020 / :24997 root        400 S   /bin/sh -c /usr/sbin/net-wall restart : Calling net-wall restart : net-wall 24998
Tue Mar 31 10:36:06 GMT 2020 / :25120 root        400 S   /bin/sh -c /usr/sbin/net-wall restart : Calling net-wall restart : net-wall 25121
Tue Mar 31 10:36:08 GMT 2020 / :25248 root        400 S   /bin/sh -c /usr/sbin/net-wall restart : Calling net-wall restart : net-wall 25249

I also noticed that /usr/sbin/dns-hijack is called as often if not even more...

 

[HELLO_wORLD]

Some progress!

Using htop and taking screenshots at the right time, I was able to find the guilty process: /sbin/traffic_meter

This is very odd, because I did notice recently that traffic meter stopped to report properly on the GUI (web interface): it was reporting 0 traffic in history, it is around when I started to have problems with my net-wall being called.
I had then disabled traffic metering from the GUI but it probably did not work. Then I forgot about that...

I just did a kill -9 on the process for traffic meter and no more calls to net-wall or dns-hijack.
On the GUI, traffic meter was showing as enabled (when I had disabled it recently, or so I thought)... I checked it off again and it seems to stick.
Will try to restart it to see if the problem reappears and if it still does not work properly... I was using traffic metering without any problem for weeks before, so there is still the mystery of why is this happening... The other thing I will need to try is to reboot and see if it does a factory reset or not...

 

[kamoj]

@HELLO_wORLD : Excellent findings!

I checked some other firmware behaviour with Traffic Meter enabled:
V1.0.2.68: "net-wall restart" is executed every 2-3 second
V1.0.2.74.4SF :"net-wall restart" is executed every 2-3 second

With Traffic Meter disabled: "net-wall restart" is not executed every 2-3 second

If you want to debug Netgear original firmware, you can do like this:

# To patch original Netgear firmware for checking net-wall calls:
# NOT for Voxel firmware!
cat << "EOF" >"/usr/sbin/net-wall.sh"
#!/bin/sh
PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin
CALLER="`ps w | grep $PPID | grep -v grep`"
[ -e /net-wall-log.txt ] && echo "`date` $PWD :$CALLER: Calling net-wall $* : ${0##*/} $$ " >>/net-wall-log.txt
/usr/sbin/net-wall-bin "$*"
EOF
chmod +x /usr/sbin/net-wall.sh
\cp -fp /usr/sbin/net-wall /usr/sbin/net-wall-bin
\mv /usr/sbin/net-wall.sh /usr/sbin/net-wall

# To see all net-wall files:
\ls -al /usr/sbin/net-wall*

# To start logging:
touch /net-wall-log.txt

# To look at the log:
cat /net-wall-log.txt

# To stop logging:
\rm -f /net-wall-log.txt

# To restore original net-wall:
\mv /usr/sbin/net-wall-bin /usr/sbin/net-wall

 

[HELLO_wORLD]

Unfortunately, this did not fix the problem this thread is about: factory reset.
Even worse now, I can’t even restore from backup like I could yesterday (from same file) as it does a factory reset doing that too and I had to re-enter everything manually... A big pain since I have a lot of settings different from default.
So I can’t reboot at all, not fun...

So the net-wall and dns-hijack weird behavior is solved (but not totally as I had traffic-meter on and all was ok until recently).
But the factory reset problem is fully there... Any progress on that?

 

[HELLO_wORLD]

Maybe it is an arbitrary issue like the following link where enterprise-grade SSDs were programmed to just 'die' at 40,000 hours?

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15673/dell-hpe-updates-for-40k-hour-essd-failures

Unlikely, because my router is quite recent (a few months)

 

[HELLO_wORLD]

Started RMA procedure with Netgear.

There is a thread about this issue (without answers on why but some information on symptoms) there:
https://community.netgear.com/t5/Ni...gurations/td-p/1541864/highlight/false/page/3

 

[tommytqt]

Started RMA procedure with Netgear.

There is a thread about this issue (without answers on why but some information on symptoms) there:
https://community.netgear.com/t5/Ni...gurations/td-p/1541864/highlight/false/page/3

Was there a long wait?