Hello all,
Just wanted to add my experience with this issue because the advice of 'just do a pin reset' which seems to be the default service response, is not good enough and incredibly frustrating for anybody who happens to actually want to 'or already has' configured any settings on the router; which one would assume is what you would be trying to do by logging in 🙂
Anyway it seems as if certain situations cause your browser to lose the session ID information that the router looks for. There are a number of things that the router will use to identify the 'logged in' user and I believe that it is using information in addition to the MAC address, probably current LAN IP also.
I have confirmed this by logging in on one computer, changing the DHCP reservation for the computer that I am logged in on, then renewing that clients lease attempting to log back in. Now in this configuration the only thing that has changed that identifies my computer to the hub, is its IP address. If I do this, every time without fail I get the other user already logged in message.
You can confirm an already open session by clicking on '> Check Router Status' and then 'Network Log' which you can access without putting in the password. You should see a LAN login success notice message. If there is not a logout, or timeout of the MAC address that corresponds to the last login, and anything has changed with that device, you will get the message.
As for why it is happening commonly when people are accessing the router? I think there are enough different configuration steps which renew the DHCP lease of clients, or reboots the hub when you click (without giving you the option to log out I may add). So if you are unlucky enough that the device you were using has its lease renewed to a different IP (or some other arbitrary session information I am not aware of that the router uses), you will get the message.
VM could of course fix the firmware in a more involved manner to keep better track of logged in sessions that can withstand the changes that are happening, but, a very simple and effective solution would be to provide a 'Log out currently logged in user on hub' button within the network status, which would of course require you to enter the router password before doing so. It being a separate, somewhat hidden button requiring some purposeful intent to access, this solution would work in conjunction well with the standard login window not allowing overlapping logins.
Currently from my testing without doing a reset, sometimes a cold reboot where you disconnect from power fully for a good 15 seconds, sometimes helps. OR, you can wait for the login session to expire but The maximum time I have seen for that to happen so far is 10 hours!
If somebody from VM could pass on this feedback that would be greatly appreciated.
As for users, the only workaround I have found is to connect via my laptop over ethernet with a browser that has no 'security' or 'ad blocking' plug ins or anything enabled, cookies allowed, and then configure a static IP on that device before you do any maintenance. In this configuration I have not noticed any of the message when changing settings.
