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XR500 - Connection Dropping, And Other Questions


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Hi all,

Recently purchased an XR500 to help get my online game levelled up. I have 150meg fiber, and the XR500 is plugged directly into the ONT on the wall.

Overall functionality has been great, and I have QoS, Geo-Fencing and daily benchmarks set up and working. I get full download and upload speeds in line with my advertised package, which is fantastic. My gaming rig is hooked up directly to the router, the rest of the home is via. WiFi.

I have a number of questions outstanding which I would appreciate some support on:

  1. Question: On the Waveform buffebloat test, I now consistently score A or A+, a massive improvement from my D score with the BT router. However using the built-in connection benchmark in DumaOS, I still get D - it seems the benchmark doesn't trigger QoS in the same way the Waveform bufferbloat test does. I've tried switching QoS to "Always Enabled" but it still doesn't improve the score. My concern is that if the test can be missed, then is it possible other games might be too? Traffic Prio does seem to work during Modern Warfare 2 as the lights are turning on under the Traffic Prioritization dashboard. I have my PC set as a games console
  2. Question: The internet in the entire home will occasionally drop, and it takes a full restart of the router at the power socket to kick back in. Checking the logs, I'd initially thought this may be due to DOS attacks (or false alerts in the log), however I can't be 100% sure of this. Any thoughts on diagnostics next? There seems to be no pattern to it in terms of time of day, or usage
  3. Question: I used PingPlotter to map my connection to the router. I'm getting occasional 100% packet loss spikes. Just to re-iterate, I'm hardwired to the router with an ethernet cable. Any thoughts on what could be driving this? Plot attached
  4. On security
    1. I've disabled UPnP - is this considered overkill or sensible? This does result in a moderate NAT but the Gibson Research Corp 'Shields up' port scan tests all give me a green score, and I'm willing to prioritize security above all
    2. I've disabled 'respond to ping on internet port' under WAN settings
    3. Any other thoughts on how to optimise security whilst balancing performance?
    4. Is adding ports to Traffic Prioritization equivalent to opening them, or just prioritizing them (as the name implies)
  5. For Info: I went down the NIC optimization rabbithole today and have turned off all power saving features on the NIC, reduced MTU to 1492 to avoid fragmentation, and disabled interrupt moderation. Given how variable latency is game to game, it's difficult to tell if this is making any difference, but thought I'd add it in as extra info

 

Cheers

Ping (2).PNG

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I can share my thoughts and answers to a few questions you have..

As far as security goes that comes down to what you feel comfortable with.. With my XR500 I have no port forwarding, no UPNP, no port triggering and no DMZ.. And I get an Open NAT.. But I also have IPV6 Enabled.. So that is why I have an Open NAT.. IPV6 doesnt use NAT..  Thats what I myself prefer..  Im not sure though if many even use IPV6 much.. But the key to using IPV6 is to have a good working correctly IPv6.. That is key to getting it to work correctly..  Do you notice a big difference between Moderate NAT to Open NAT? I would say its a split while some use UPNP and some use port forwarding.. If I was to pick from one Id likely use port triggering.. Thats just me though if I was using just IPV4..

Also Prioritizing ports on the QoS page is not at all the same as opening a port.. So no worries there..

When using PingPlotter you want to watch the last hop and see if you notice any packet loss.. In your graph above your connection looks decent except for the red line bars.. That indicates usually packet loss.. Also do the test again but at a slower interval like 1 sec. or 1.5 sec..  When you are using Ping Plotter are you wired to your router or are you doing this over wifi? Also make sure everything is running through your XR500.. 

Why you have an interruption in your connection is an interesting one.. How often does this happen? Its possible this could be caused by a DHCP release and renew of ip's to your devices..  Netduma may have good advice to you on this..

Good luck!

Zippy.

 

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Great answer above.

On your questions:

  1. Would you be able to send a screenshot of the completed Benchmark test and perhaps your QoS settings too? That might offer some more insight into the varying results.
  2. Could you please try going to Settings -> Setup -> LAN Setup and set the minimum DHCP value to .100. Then reserve IPs for every device on the network. Give them IP from .2 to .99. After that, see if the connection still drops.
  3. Did you have any other traffic running at the time of the Ping Plotter? Even if you were just watching a YouTube video in the background or something, it could interrupt the ping plotter and drop a packet or two.
  4. I agree with Zippy's comments on this, well put!
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Thanks both for the answers. @Zippy - I'll read into IPv6 to get a better understanding of what's what, thanks for the avenue.

@Netduma Liam here you go. The prioritized device with 11 on the flower is my gaming PC, same device on the traffic Prio which I've tagged as a games console.

Another one - Hula and 4oD have both stopped working on the TV, but Youtube and Netflix are fine. Coincides exactly with the router installation. Any thoughts?  

Thanks!

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We need to improve the Benchmark results so if changing the Congestion Control percentages when set to Always doesn't lower that upload spike on Ping Under Load then you can ignore that. 

For the applications not working, disable QoS completely from the Congestion Control menu, do they work again?

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Thanks Fraser - will disable QoS and test tomorrow for the streaming apps.

Re your first comment -  are you saying that I can safely ignore the benchmark result, or I should test moving the sliders whilst setting CC to 'always'?

Cheers

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I would suggest testing different percentages, if it's working as expected then your results for Ping Under Load should improve, if the results don't improve then QoS is working as shown by your waveform results and it's just Benchmark that isn't reflecting the effect properly which we'll work on.

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  • 3 weeks later...

So I've reserved IP addresses for all my devices as listed above.

Still having the same issue with internet dropping. Typically happens once or twice a day, in this pattern:

  • Websites will fail to load and anything connected via. WiFi or my ethernet wired PC will disconnect
  • The connection will sporadically resume and drop every couple of minutes following the first drop, and this will happen continuously if left as-is
  • This is only resolved with a hard power off/power on of the router, at which point a stable connection returns

I've just had a couple of drops within the last 5 minutes. Log over the same period:

[admin login] from source x, Thursday, December 08, 2022 09:51:00
[admin login] from source x, Thursday, December 08, 2022 09:51:01
[DoS Attack: ACK Scan] from source: 199.232.57.111, port 443, Thursday, December 08, 2022 09:51:39
[DumaOS] applying qos for zone wan, Thursday, December 08, 2022 09:52:04
[DumaOS] applying qos for zone lan, Thursday, December 08, 2022 09:52:07
[DumaOS] config write 'com.netdumsoftware.geofilter.settings', Thursday, December 08, 2022 09:52:08
[DumaOS] applying qos for zone wan, Thursday, December 08, 2022 09:52:19
[DumaOS] applying qos for zone lan, Thursday, December 08, 2022 09:52:20
[DumaOS] applying qos for zone wan, Thursday, December 08, 2022 09:53:02
[DumaOS] applying qos for zone lan, Thursday, December 08, 2022 09:53:04
[DumaOS] applying qos for zone wan, Thursday, December 08, 2022 09:54:17
[DumaOS] applying qos for zone lan, Thursday, December 08, 2022 09:54:19
[DoS Attack: ACK Scan] from source: 18.165.227.115, port 443, Thursday, December 08, 2022 09:54:48
[DumaOS] applying qos for zone wan, Thursday, December 08, 2022 09:55:01
[DumaOS] applying qos for zone lan, Thursday, December 08, 2022 09:55:03
[DoS Attack: ACK Scan] from source: 18.165.227.115, port 443, Thursday, December 08, 2022 09:55:50
[DumaOS] applying qos for zone wan, Thursday, December 08, 2022 09:56:25
[DumaOS] applying qos for zone lan, Thursday, December 08, 2022 09:56:27

 

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Thanks Liam,

The connection to the dashboard also tends to glitch out when I'm getting the drops - if I'm already connected it'll show the internet status as "connected" on the dashboard when the drops are happening, but nothing on the dashboard will update and if I try to refresh, it'll just show me the spinning "loading" icons until it reconnects. This has been the same behavior pre and post DHCP changes.

Will try the above on the next drop and report back

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Thanks Fraser,

Just so I'm 100% aligned, you want me to take a copy of the log during one of these outages and paste it here? From my above log that I posted, it didn't look like there was a huge amount being posted to the log during the 5 minutes I captured, but will certainly try again.

Thanks

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Right, so just had a drop.

Unfortunately on this occasion, there was no intermittent recovery - it was just gone for good. I first powered down the ONT (I'm on BT FTTP) and repowered to rule out the connection into the house, this didn't make a difference.

I left the connection for 10-15 minutes and repeatedly tried to reconnect to both of those links you shared above Fraser, but couldn't gain a connection - although when trying to access the router login, it did switch from an Edge "err_connection_timed_out" message to a dumaOS spinning wheel at one point, but didn't go any further.

This one was a critical one was it cut me off whilst on a work call, so eager for anything you guys can do to help.

Cheers

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7 hours ago, Netduma Liam said:

Interesting, OK thank you. I'm afraid I don't know what more we can look at until we can get you a new firmware to test. We're currently testing a release candidate for the XR500, so hopefully we should soon be able to get that released finally. Apologies for the inconvenience!

Bet it takes till next year been patiently waiting it's so slow on how long this has been I'm kinda very very unhappy about how slow my xr500 is gonna be until u guys get it fully ready it's been far too long if it doesn't by new years I'm switching to asus and never looking back I'm very annoyed with update process it's been almost a while year u guys r supposed to always b up to date!

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Ok so I've isolated the separate issue around streaming apps (on the Samsung TV - i.e My4 and ITV) not working at all.

If I disable congestion control via. the '3 line' menu, they start working immediately.

I tried to experiment with turning it back on and setting the TV priority in the flower to higher, and also setting up a custom traffic prioritisation rule (set as netflix). These didn't seem to make a difference.

Any thoughts on these ones? Thanks for the help Liam, Fraser

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51 minutes ago, plaidtripod said:

Ok so I've isolated the separate issue around streaming apps (on the Samsung TV - i.e My4 and ITV) not working at all.

If I disable congestion control via. the '3 line' menu, they start working immediately.

I tried to experiment with turning it back on and setting the TV priority in the flower to higher, and also setting up a custom traffic prioritisation rule (set as netflix). These didn't seem to make a difference.

Any thoughts on these ones? Thanks for the help Liam, Fraser

This is something we're aware of, it's something we've managed to fix on the R2 according to a user having the same problem so possible it'll be fixed in the XR500 build. I'll add your name to the list so you can try it when we expand the group.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Cheers gents,

 

Managed to pull a log whilst I was having one of the "on/off" events, as it let me into the admin page. Only thing that seems to be happening during this time is the application of QoS, interestingly I wasn't playing any games at the time and none were loaded on my system....

 

 

Log1.txt

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1 hour ago, plaidtripod said:

Cheers gents,

Managed to pull a log whilst I was having one of the "on/off" events, as it let me into the admin page. Only thing that seems to be happening during this time is the application of QoS, interestingly I wasn't playing any games at the time and none were loaded on my system....

Log1.txt 11.37 kB · 0 downloads

Thanks for that, I've added you to the group, see if that resolves your issue please

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