New Release - My Net Router Firmware Updates (12/20/12)

Bill_S wrote:

We forwarded this thread to the product group.  I don’t know if they have reproduced it or not.  I’m sure they’re looking into it, but it may take a bit to get a response. 

 

If  they need more information, they will private message.  Please respond to your private messages, if you don’t, this issue may not go any further with them.  This is happening a lot to us, where we pm users for more information, but nobody responds.

 

Some things to try, and/or make sure of, or be aware of:

  1.  Do not place the router inside a cabinet.  It will collect heat. 
  2.  Do not stack other devices on top it.  It will collect heat.
  3.  If you’ve done a firmware update on it, you may want to do a factory reset.
  4.  The fan doesn’t kick in until the chipset inside actually hits 68 degrees Celsius.  That’s 157 degrees Fahrenheit.  
  5.  The fan doesn’t hit full speed until the temperature hits over 75 degrees Celsius. 
  6.  The fan is extremely quiet.  If it is running, it pulls air in from the top and blows it out the bottom of the router.

If you really think the router is overheating, are the leds blinking?  Have you lost all connectivity to the Wifi, Usb, and Ethernet?  That would be happening if it is truly overheating. 

 

However, if you are experiencing drop offs, then that could be due to something else - which we are also looking into.

1,2) The router is sitting on top of my desk with nothing over, under (besides the laptop cooling pad), or around it within a foot (the usb hdd I have been testing with has a 6’ cable and is on the other side of my desk).

  1. After having my initial issues with the router locking up under really any kind of load even light loads, I came to the forums and found this tid bit of info.  I also tried downgrading the firmware and then reapplying updates in a row without skipping any as that was also reported to help.  I cannot confirm nor deny that doing so really helped at all as my unit would still lockup under light loads prior to my cd case and cooling pad tests.

4,5,6) At one point I propped the unit up on it’s side so I could see the fan and watch if it came on.  I only saw it ever spin once, and even then it was spinning so slow I could count the revolutions.  During this test, the router only dropped out after copying around 2gb of data via ethernet to the usb hdd I had hooked up to port 1.  As soon as windows reported the drive was unavailable, I felt the bottom of the router and it was hot enough for me to not leave my hand on it.

I have never had all the LEDs blink in sync like the manual says they should if it overheats, but if you read my previous posts on this thread, something inside is definitely overheating since just propping it up on a cd case helped a lot and then adding a laptop cooler totally fixed 99% of the issues (only remaining is the DLNA dropping out after 6 days which I suppose I can live with since it just required a power cycle and no files were deleted/corrupted).  As you mentioned, when it used to lock up on me, first the USB would become unavailable, then the interface I was copying over would drop out followed shortly by any remaining interfaces (ie: if I was using wifi, it would go and then LAN or the other way around if I was using the LAN to copy), including the wd dashboard, and finally the wd quick view would stop reporting the N900 on my network.  This would all happening within about 10~15 seconds of the USB drive failing to report so seeing a delayed drop-out on some devices could easily be explained my local buffered cache on those devices (my wii is usually the last device to say it lost the internet while watching a movie).  Where is the thermal sensor(s) at and how often are they polled by the chipset to determine the fan speed?  Could it simply be that where the sensor is at is not getting that hot, but some other part is (such as any onboard cache/ram or UARTs) which is then causing the onboard firmware/software to crash when it goes to poll these other devices inside the unit?

As a side note, I find it interesting that you guys are trying to pull cool air in from the top and exhaust it out the bottom since that is inherently backwards from how typical heat convection works.  It would seem to me to be more efficient to simply turn the fan around and pull cool air from below and push it up in the direction the heat is naturally trying to flow than force it go in the opposite direction.

Also, how do you check your PMs?  I have looked under my profile and poked around a few other places and have yet to see where you would even check for them.

1 Like

I found the PM icon.  It’s the little envelope looking thing that is smaller than the bold and underline buttons on the input box here but is up in the top right corner directly across from “Help” for anyone else looking for it.

varxx wrote:
@Bill_S: I’m pleased to see your post in this thread. Thanks. One question: I can’t find where on this forum to see if I’ve received an private messages. I’ve used private messaging many times on many other forums, but I must be losing my mind. Could you direct me to the PM section of this forum? Thanks.

You can access your private messages through the little gray envelope icon in the upper right corner below the WD Knowledge Base link.  If you have a private message it will say, “1 (or more) Unread.”

HeatProblems wrote:
Thanks Bill. That is an accurate descriptions of the symptoms I encountered on 2 routers with the oldest firmware. Too bad I did not know that before replacing the original router. Now I have to pay $20 for shipping the old modem back to WD.

I have tested 1.4.11 the whole day today. This firmware is not really NAS friendly, but at least the WiFi works with minimum drops. No hangs whatsoever!

I’m glad to hear that it’s not hanging up.

Maddog82 wrote:> 1,2) The router is sitting on top of my desk with nothing over, under (besides the laptop cooling pad), or around it within a foot (the usb hdd I have been testing with has a 6’ cable and is on the other side of my desk).

  1. After having my initial issues with the router locking up under really any kind of load even light loads, I came to the forums and found this tid bit of info.  I also tried downgrading the firmware and then reapplying updates in a row without skipping any as that was also reported to help.  I cannot confirm nor deny that doing so really helped at all as my unit would still lockup under light loads prior to my cd case and cooling pad tests.

4,5,6) At one point I propped the unit up on it’s side so I could see the fan and watch if it came on.  I only saw it ever spin once, and even then it was spinning so slow I could count the revolutions.  During this test, the router only dropped out after copying around 2gb of data via ethernet to the usb hdd I had hooked up to port 1.  As soon as windows reported the drive was unavailable, I felt the bottom of the router and it was hot enough for me to not leave my hand on it.

I have never had all the LEDs blink in sync like the manual says they should if it overheats, but if you read my previous posts on this thread, something inside is definitely overheating since just propping it up on a cd case helped a lot and then adding a laptop cooler totally fixed 99% of the issues (only remaining is the DLNA dropping out after 6 days which I suppose I can live with since it just required a power cycle and no files were deleted/corrupted).  As you mentioned, when it used to lock up on me, first the USB would become unavailable, then the interface I was copying over would drop out followed shortly by any remaining interfaces (ie: if I was using wifi, it would go and then LAN or the other way around if I was using the LAN to copy), including the wd dashboard, and finally the wd quick view would stop reporting the N900 on my network.  This would all happening within about 10~15 seconds of the USB drive failing to report so seeing a delayed drop-out on some devices could easily be explained my local buffered cache on those devices (my wii is usually the last device to say it lost the internet while watching a movie).  Where is the thermal sensor(s) at and how often are they polled by the chipset to determine the fan speed?  Could it simply be that where the sensor is at is not getting that hot, but some other part is (such as any onboard cache/ram or UARTs) which is then causing the onboard firmware/software to crash when it goes to poll these other devices inside the unit?

As a side note, I find it interesting that you guys are trying to pull cool air in from the top and exhaust it out the bottom since that is inherently backwards from how typical heat convection works.  It would seem to me to be more efficient to simply turn the fan around and pull cool air from below and push it up in the direction the heat is naturally trying to flow than force it go in the opposite direction.

Also, how do you check your PMs?  I have looked under my profile and poked around a few other places and have yet to see where you would even check for them.

I found that interesting too.  I have passed your post along.

I got my new/replacement N900 7xgb version in today and it came pre-loaded with firmware 1.03.11.  I am going to leave it at that for now and run some tests to see if it’s stable.  Should those pass, I will update the firmware and re-run the tests and let those who read this thread know my results.

Time will tell, but so far so good.  This new router is MUCH cooler than the last under load and doesn’t have my laptop cooler pad under it.  I did leave it propped up on the cd though to not mush my luck too far yet.  Transfer rates to the usb hdd are down to almost half of what they were before, 24MBps now, but that seems more in line with what others have reported.  I will rerun my 200GB copy test again after I update the firmware to the latest.

I did notice that the open source download for the firmware went from 484MB (1.05.12) down to 376MB (1.06.18)?  Not that I mind a more well coded source but 20% savings is pretty hefty unless it was all from removing pseudo code.  I hope to be able to get some time this weekend to look into the source code.

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=1703&sid=179&lang=en

I have updated my firmware to the latest, and now the internal 2TB drive is not showing up again!!!  **bleep**!  Why does this stuff just not work?  Is this not even tested?

I am thinking this second unit is going back to amazon as well.  I just can’t beileve it really just doesn’t work.  Also, while copying 175gb from my work PC to this device at home over the internet, it cept failing, finally loosing connection and not working again.

Not happy with WD at all on this one.

Erik

I still haven’t had time to look into the source code due to work being busy, but my replacement router took 3 weeks and 1 day to lockup using the 1.03.11 firmware it came with.  The only two things I have noticed with 1.03.11 is that the USB attached hard drive speed tops out at 24mbps and that my friends PS3 suffers from a LOT of stuttering even though it shows a green link.  And yes, after he complained I set a prioritization rule to highest for his PS3’s local IP for both TCP and UDP and it didn’t seem to change anything for his PS3 but it did make the rest of my network stream wifi much slower.

Hi,

Just to let you know that WD just released version 1.06.28 of it’s Firmware. 

Still not allow me to get access to the content of the USB Storage using SMB, but that’s not a real problem to me now… I’ve worked out something else. 

But for me, one issue solved : I kept getting internet connection drops. Those seem to have vanished. 

Now, let’s wait to see how reliable this is over several days… and if it is reliable, this would be a major improvement ! 

Regards. 

NetPenguin

I’ve got my N900 last week. It came with some old firmware, which I did update online to the latest and greatest 1.06.28. The router did replace an ancient Linksys WRT54GC that had been running trouble-free for years, but was lacking GB-Ethernet and 7 ports of that, too.

Long story short, today suddenly my brother wasn’t able to access the network with his wireless notebook. Turned out it wasn’t able to get a DHCP lease, while wired computers were still able to access the LAN and internet. The router would respond to “ping” over the LAN, but wouldn’t deliver the config page. Power-cycling did restore full functionality, but that’s not what I want to do regularly with a brand-new router and central point of the IT infrastructure!

I’ve bought the router to replace the old one and an ethernet switch with just one device. Currently, none of the fancy functions are activated. It’s simply working as router for the internet (modem connected to WAN port) and as WLAN access point, but most of the time only wired devices are in use. Room temperature is approx. 21°C (50°F),  the outside of the router is warm, but the largest temperature I’ve been able to find with a little IR heat sensing device was less than 35°C (90°F). I guess that means there’s  no heat problem.

The thread title still applies: WD Tech, please reply and solve those stability issues!

Regards

Ektus.

I and others are having similar issues. May I suggest using firmware 1.05.12 and see if that works better.

You get it here at:

http://products.wdc.com/n900centralrollback/

I also am having trouble with 1.06.28. It will look like it is working fine but then suddenly it won’t work unless I reboot the router. But I have to do this constantly and so I decided to just roll back  When I use 1.05.12, it is much more stable.

Please use 1.05.12 for now.

I’ll give the current version another chance before downgrading, and WD time to deliver a new version. As long as the reboot is “only” once a week, it’s quite time consuming to test and decide if the older version is really better. If it’s only wireless and DHCP that gets dropped, I can live with that for the time being. But I don’t want to live with it forever!

Regards

Ektus.

Hi,

Just a post to report that my N900 is now up and running trouble free for about 12 days. 

The trouble-free applies to wired connections as to wireless connections. 

EKTUS : I have had similar problems to the ones your report : router not delivering an IP address over DHCP to a wireless computer. But that was also BEFORE i bought my N900. The roblem was either the computer or the router my ISP provided… but the only that helped was to reboot the computer or at least to close a session and open another one. So the problem could be related to a router or to the computer… But I suspect the computer to be at fault as the ISP router could release DHCP addresses to other devices and because it is unbelievably reliable (I reboot it about 3 or 4 times a year… and half of the reboots are just to apply a FW upgrade !). 

So, now my only problem is that USB ports sharing feature that is not working as expected for me. This feature offers three problems : 

  • problem 1 : the hard drive connected does not appear with it’s given name. It appears under the model # of the hard drive, which is not really convenient. It also mounts a 220Mb large partition that cannot be written. 

  • problem 2 : I cannot share the content of a USB attached hard drive with my SMB enabled Blu-Ray player (an Oppo BDP-105). According to Oppo, this is probably related with the SMB version that is used by WD, which is either old or a custom one. 

  • problem 3 : if I connect 2 external hard drives using a USB Hub, only one drive shows up. 

SUGGESTIONS TO WD : 

  • concerning problem 1 : to allow the user from within the user interface, to assign a specific name to a hard drive. Synology allows to do that on it’s devices. I guess WD should be able to do that also. 

  • concerning problem 2 : if possible, upgrade to  the “genuine” latest version of SMB. Problem : if I got it right the implementation of an old version is due to some licensing restrictions…

  • concerning problem 3 : I suspect that this is a hardware limit, but as there are 2 USB ports, I guess I could live with that for a while. If the problem can be circumvented, I would find that quite useful. 

Regards.

NetPenguin

I have just purchased and installed an N600 device, also updated it to the latest firmware, 1.04.16.

I was trying to connect an external USB storage device and I found a serious issue:

It appearch that the N600 does NOT support exFat formatted devices. 

FAT, FAT32 and NTFS formatted drives work. You’re certainly aware of the limitations of FAT and FAT32 in terms supported size and max. number of directory entries.  NTFS has never been developed for using it on external flash drives either. It is also difficult to work with NTFS filesystems from OS X.

exFAT has been around for a 5-6 years now and was introduced by Microsoft to address the limitattions of FAT and FAT32.

I am very surprised that WD did not consider supporting it, although it widely supported (among others by both Microsoft and Apple)

SUMMARY

=========

* The list of supported filesystems on external usb storage devices is MISSING from the product specification.

* exFAT formatted usb external devices SEEM NOT to work with N600

Thanks

That’s a bummer, how about using HFS+? That’s what I have my drive formatted to, but then again I primarily use Mac.

Only case-INsensitive mode is supported, that complicates things a little as my mac’s hard drive is case-SEnsintive and I use the external drive for other purposes as well. Anyway, thanks for the hint!

P.S. Dear WD, exFat support is STILL WELCOME!

You are SOOOOO lucky if you only have to reset once a week.  My N900 has to be reset repeatedly when I move or upload files.

Any chance we’ll see at least another firmware update for the N750, even beta?

Definitely looks like some cleanup is needed on the DNS Proxy Enabled setting for the N750. This seems to mess up even parental controls, too by the router getting bogged down eventually (2+ days). Turning this off improves the speed of parental controls and keeps the router from getting bogged down. Would love to see an improvement to this setting, even just a small tweak.