Superhub requires daily restarts, all services stop working

[oli356]

Over a few month period in 2020 we had several visits from Virgin technicians of different seniority who replaced the Superhub (twice in fact), changed all cabling from the house to the cabinet and exhausted all troubleshooting steps (including support from the network team). 

The problem is that the hub would stop responding, new clients wouldn't get an IP address, existing clients had the connectivity stop working etc (no Internet access, hub Web page not accessible etc). The workaround was to restart the superhub which I had to do literally a 100+ times throughout this period in 2020 as the hub was breaking one or more times a day.

The only solution we found was using Modem mode on the hub and Virgin contributed a small sum of money towards buying the router. 

Long story short, yesterday I reset the superhub and disconnected the 3rd party router. The hub was now acting as a router again for the first time in 2 years. 4 hours later whilst doing a presentation to 50 people, the router broke with the exact same symptoms as it had back in 2020. 

I was debating to myself whether to try and follow this up with Virgin considering the time it took for both parties to deal with this last time, with no actual fix and virgin techs were completely out of ideas. The only thing we never tried was trying the latest version of the superhub, I can't remember why, but considering every cable from the premise to the cab was changed, I don't know why this was never tried. The problem can't be with the wan considering LAN connectivity and services (dhcp) breaks when we have the issue. 

However without getting this resolved properly, I am unable to extend the wireless in the house without buying another 3rd party router which I do not want to do. 

[oli356]

Yes, it changed when go between modem mode and router mode.

What are you suggesting to look for? Everything is fine in modem mode. Nor does the problem always always happen at 8pm in router mode. What does dhcp have to do with anything? Even without dhcp the hub should be able to respond to a ping from a wired client. 

[legacy1]

DHCP the WAN is just for checking ARP to the VM gateway is most important with router mode you can't see this.

But if modem mode is fine and you tested that to be sure then the problem is router mode DHCP or ARP on the WAN

[oli356]

No need to check the WAN gateway though as that is fine, able to ping the public IP of the hub even when I'm not able to ping the private 192.168.0.1 IP.

And well it's still not specific to DHCP. Once the endpoints have an IP address, dhcp is done with unless they are renewing etc.. But if I have endpoints connected, and therefore have IP addresses, when I then am unable to ping the private gateway and out onto the Internet, then it's not a dhcp issue. 

[legacy1]

We don't know If VM are doing a custom DHCP client that may for all we know does a request every hour thats router mode we know nothing what VM are doing on the WAN which is why if it works in modem mode then something is wrong with router mode.

in modem mode the max DHCP lease is 7 days and say a windows DHCP client checks this at some point but VM may for some reason does a renew every hour lets say why? who knows because we don't know because router mode.

So again if it works in modem mode then the problem is with router mode.

It may have nothing to do with DHCP but in router mode the hub is responsible for linking to the gateway if for what every reason that stops then no traffic to the internet. 

[oli356]

But it's just not traffic to the Internet, its traffic to the 192.168.0.1 IP too. Even if dhcp leeses were being refreshed hourly, what's the problem here unless the hub for some reason can't handle a dozen clients doing a simple 2 packet exchange.

I'm reluctant to put the hub into router mode for troubleshooting purposes because its a guaranteed failure scenario. When on calls from home, it's not ideal. Likewise doing long term packet captures isn't viable either without restarting it often before wireshark crashes.

I'm hoping Virgin can suggest something without doing extensive troubleshoot tasks in router mode which is just an unstable setup. 

[Martin_N]

Hi oli356,

Thank you for your post. We're sorry to hear you're continuing to have issues with your service. 

I have taken a look on our side and I can see you have spoken with the team regarding this. 

Have you been able to progress this?

^Martin

[oli356]

Hi Martin 

A technician came out and wanted to replace the hub, after telling him the background from 2020 and that we tried 3 hubs, so he swapped it out with a hub 4 instead which is what I wanted as it's the only thing we never tried a couple of years back. 

So far so good....