I just purchased a MyNet N900 and have been experiencing hangs requiring reboots. I suspect it is overheading and the fan may be defective. I’ve never seen the fan turn on.
I found a page on the device that displays temperature and fan speed:
I’ve never heard the fan come on, but I can tell you this router gets pretty hot and all the reviews had me nervous. That said, I’ve heard that going to firmware 1.03 helps, but then your file transfer speeds take a pretty big hit.
Still, you can always take matters into your own hands and install a bigger heatsink, which is what I did. Mine maxed out at around 45 while transfering 2TB worth movies over. So far everything is running great with the latest firmware, and I even have a 4TB installed on the spare USB port.
(Edit - I made some changes to the case cover, because was holding too much heat, and the temps at full load is now 41 )
It would be nice if the fan just came on above a temperature threshold. A larger heatsink so it can run fanless is nice, but it ought to work without overheating out of the box…
I’m glad I can offer a solution, but I know what you mean.
It looks like WD maybe washing their hands of these routers. This has been going on for some time now, and if WD wanted to change the fan threshold, then they could of. Maybe they don’t want any backlash about the fan noise, but the complaints of overheating and rebooting don’t seem to be a priority.
That said, I got this 2TB router for $84, and with another 4TB of storage, it’s a nice/power conservative media server that’s streaming my collection of movies and files to my family houses. It was a small inconvenience that I had to mod it, but at least it will be reliable and quiet for now.
I’ll keep my fingers crossed that WD keeps updating the firmware on these units, so let’s see what happens.
Here’s something interesting. If you telnet in (using the authentication info here), there are several fan related /proc files: /proc/fanspeed and /proc/fantimer. echo “100 100” > /proc/fantimer gets the fan moving.
I now show:
T: 36
RPM: 2407
I have yet to figure out where to put this so that it occurs automatically after a reboot.
Jamie56, what you found is very interesting. I don’t care about noise (though even with the fan on 100% it isn’t loud) because I have a USB powered fan underneath a wire rack to keep it cool. The fan at full blast along with my USB powered fan underneath the router produces temperatures in the range of 32C at idle and 37C under very extreme load (multiple instances of NetStress running over both 2.4ghz/5 ghz wireless bands and wired). Without the fan running at full speed(or rather the fan running at all ever), the temperatures would idle around 44C and approach 50C under extreme load even with my “creative cooling solution.” I’ve spent about a week sorting through various settings and the temperature was still a little high for my liking, and I would get random drop outs of wireless connectivity and lose connection to the internet briefly under load. However, with the fan running at full blast I’ve found the router is very stable with little issues over the past 2 days. I wish WD would update the firmware once more to address some of the issues still lingering and allow us the ability to control the fan via the Web GUI.
However, if you find out how to automatically apply this settings when the router boots I’d be very appreciative if you posted it!
I ended up buying a small laptop cooler for this router to resolve this issue. It seems to have done an ok job for keeping it cool, but it should not be required given that the router has a fan built-in.
Did either of you take a look at the samba part of this guy? I was trying to get a large HDD enclosure to work with this guy.
No it shouldn’t be required, and I’m really not sure why WD hasn’t stepped up to this issues. Also, I’m not sure why WD hasn’t added some simple items like these, and I’ve actually have fixed some of these issues temporarly, I need to script them on a reboot.
Static ARP for WOL.
Port-forwarding to the router’s IP (FTP & SSH)
Samba and FTP shares use the volume label, or atleast set the FTP user’s home directory to the /var/tmp/storage directory. (ES File Explorer doesn’t work well with Androids)
Add more users and permissions to shares, atleast a guest account.
I hope my answer helped on the other topic. Samba did give me some issues also on my 4TB drive, but it’s working just fine now.
The simple answer is yes. Too much heat can cause stability issues, it can also decrease the life expectance of a product. If you have a N900 Central, then you’re also exposing the drive to higher tempatures.
It’s better to play it safe if you want your router to last longer and run reliable. I’m depending on this router to run 24/7 to stream movies and files to my family’s houses, it needs to be reliable. That said, I needed it to run passive, because it’s sitting in my livingroom and that fan would drive me nuts. :confounded:
How did you rewire it? I’d love to do this, what did you do? Pictures? I just did the telnet using putty and have DevInfo open, just watching the temp drop… Currently at 4108 rpms, thank god! I’d love to keep the fan on perminantly, thouh… Might even do the heat sink mod and add a few more fans… This thing used to be an awesome router, I’d love to get it working right again! I’ve been using an Asus router running tomato but it doesn’t have the speed…
indeed the command you mention works or you could just issue this one:
mfc fan <highspeed|normalspeed|stop>
If you just want it to start revolving at boot, simply add “mfc fan normalspeed” after 109th line in “/internalhd/root/usr/local/orion/communicationmanager/communicationmanagerd” (not sure if the path is exact).
I was able to turn on the Telnet service for the router, but the OrionInfo.php page will not show up (404 Not Found) for me to turn the SSH on and get into the files to command the fan on full time at boot up. I’m using the latest firmware from May of 2013.
