Tonight, I was watching a TV programme that I was streaming from my desktop computer (which is connected to the Superhub 3 by ethernet) to my Apple TV, which is connected wirelessly using the 5GHz wifi. This is nothing unusual. I do it pretty much every night. Suddenly, the picture froze. I waited a short while, and then attempted to recover the playback, whereupon the Apple TV informed me that it was no longer connected to a network. I then looked at the front of the TiVo V6, and it had the two red lights showing that it too had no connectivity (again, it is connected wirelessly to the router via the 5GHz). I then checked all of my other devices - three phones, two iPads, a laptop and an iPod. None had connectivity via wifi. In fact the network had disappeared from every device.
I tried all the usual resets and restarts but to no avail. On each restart, the hub settled with just the white light, and the desktop had full connectivity to the hub and the 'net via its ethernet connection. So I thought I would log into the router and see if I could see anything wrong with the wifi configuration. Except it wouldn't let me in …
Eventually, I rang to speak to someone. The call went on a long time with lots of long blank line periods whilst the lad was doing stuff down the network. After several attempts, he finally got the (a) network pair to show up on my iPhone. No sign of my original network names that lived in the hub, though. We were back to the VM xxxxxxxxx 2G and 5G names that they come out of the factory with. So I had to use the factory password to connect with my iPhone, and it did. I asked the lad I was talking to if it was ok to go back into the router and reset my network names and passwords as many people visit the house and have automatic connection to my network. But he seemed adamant that I should keep using the complicated password on the hub. I eventually got all of my devices reconnected, including the TiVo, but I had to do a full new-install-style connection to get that back. So I'm assuming that in order to get the router out of the funk it had got itself into, the guy had to do some kind of down-the-network factory reset that wiped out all the configuration stuff that I'd got stored in the hub.
But here's the kicker. Once I had it all working again, I thought that I would go into the router, and rename the networks back as they were, along with the passwords. But it won't let me in. On the login page, it is suggesting that it wants the password on the bottom of the hub. Fair enough I suppose if it has undergone a factory reset. Remember, this password works just fine to get my devices onto the network, so is definitely correct and recognised by the router when it's an external device asking for a wifi connection. But it won't work to gain IP access to the hub itself. It just keeps telling me that the password is wrong. I have also tried the original password that I had in there for configuration access that has always worked fine, just in case it was 'burnt' into the code somewhere, but it says that one is wrong as well.
So, my big questions. Does anyone know a way to either recover the password that the hub thinks that it has for access to itself, or bypass it ? And what can have gone wrong to cause all this in the first place ? Could something have happened on the VM network to 'spike' my hub's OS ? Sorry it's long, but the devil's in the detail, as they say … 