Virgin Media Community

[par42]

Came home this evening to an unhappy household with no Wifi.  Service has been intermittent for several weeks with 3 Virgin vans parked in my street messing about in the green boxes - so I suspected a broken connection but no my main machine with wired connection was working.  

So I try to log on to the router to check the wifi and it is showing me a fresh installation screen and is not accepting my password.  So I try the settings password off the bottom of the router and it logs in and then demands a new password - So I reenter my old new one and off it goes to restart and asks me for me my new password and it does not accept it - but does accept the settings password and reboots - so restart and back to to new password and round we go again and again.

Eventually after several power off restarts it accepts the new (old) password and it seems to have remembered all of my old settings and Wifi is back to the state it was in yesterday (poor coverage, intermittent, dropping connections from 4 meters etc..)

Is it time for me to demand a replacement ?

[legacy1]

Bugs sure do happen with the hub 3 but sure you can demand another hub but that likely will not help you as it maybe a firmware problem or just bad wifi from the start so maybe think about using the hub in modem mode and get your own wireless router with 1Gb ports.

[jbrennand]

Do a pinhole reset to factory settings. With the Hub "on" push in the pin on the back/side/bottom of the Hub with the end of a paperclip until you feel it at the “stop point” and hold for a "timed" 60 seconds do NOT restart the Hub after that. Your passwords/passphrase for both the Hub settings and Wifi networks should revert to the two printed on the Hub sticker on its base/side/card. If that doesn’t sort it - call it in as faulty.

[VMCopperUser]

I am not sure I would try resetting it.  If it was a router you owned then I would obviously go that path first.  The thing I would worry about is that the flash is corrupt (for some odd reason) and resetting it could just make things worse.

The other thing is that these units (Sh1, Sh2, Sh2ac, Hub3, and probably others) seem to go haywire when signal levels are really bad and the units are suffering disconnections.

If you tried changing things and applying those changes and they didn't take, then I would say the flash is bad and you need a new unit.

If the connection was going up and down like a yoyo but it's all stable now then it could just be the way these things flake out when signal is lost.  Just change the password in the unit from whatever it is now to something different.  If it works then no biggie, change it back.

[-tony-]

if the flash is corrup - where has that come from - never seen that as a reason for any fault before - if there is a problem with the firmware the hub will simply download it again

resetting will not cause a problem on its own - fully agree if the hub is faulty then it needs replacing but nothing so far says it is

[VMCopperUser]

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@-tony- wrote:

if the flash is corrup - where has that come from - never seen that as a reason for any fault before - if there is a problem with the firmware the hub will simply download it again

resetting will not cause a problem on its own - fully agree if the hub is faulty then it needs replacing but nothing so far says it is

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I have about a dozen Netgear units here from beta test.  The fault he describes, trying to apply a setting change and the unit refusing to accept it, then reverting to the old values is symptomatic of how their units tend to work when there is a fault in the nvram.  I have not had a chance to delve into the way the SH's store and retriever their settings and firmware, but generally speaking the nvram has partitions, one may be recovery booting, one may be the main firmware, one will be a factory settings set, and another the user settings set.  So his fault would lead me to think that the unit Is either failing to write a change (to the user set, thus loading a factory value), or failing to read a user setting (again, thus loading a factory value).  There is also the chance that checks done when trying to apply changes were getting thrown out due to some check in the firmware failing.

My GUESS is that if they were working on the connections and the unit was going up and down then it simply failed at saving settings due to the overall crappy design of the firmware.  If that's not the case then I stand by there being a problem with the flash - and the unit needing to be replaced.