It's BACK!!! The HubOne "Hone Network" router reboot bug!

[#1]

@bobpullen just dropped you a PM back! Replacement turned up today and the old one is on its way back. 

Thanks for your help!

[#2]

Did the replacement fix the problem?

[#3]

Worked right out of the box yes.. so far at least.

I'm not so confident it will continue to do so if it upgrades its firmware though. I've also not tinkered with the 5GHz yet - I'm going to leave that until Bob has had a look at the old one and had it investigated as i don't want to turn off the 5GHz on this one and then have it all go belly up.

We don't need the 5GHz anyway so its pointless for us to have it and i would prefer to turn it off however until Bob is able to conclusively say one way or the other that it is safe to turn off / no bug in the firmware then i'm just going to leave it as is for the time being.

[#4]

It's a strange one.

I remember Google Home devices causing reboots but that doesn't seem to be the case here.

[#5]

I suspect its a firmware glitch as this behaviour did occur last year before vanishing again and the router working well. At that point it seemed like its woes were over.

If it was a fault with the device itself hardware wise i would expect to see other random quirks like flaky wifi, random reboots and/or other pages of the admin control panel not working properly but its the "Home Network" link that does it every time, guaranteed as shown in the video (note the sound of the mouse button click and the light on the device changing colour that very same moment).

What makes it worse is that if you use google chrome as a browser, by default it will continue to keep trying a url until it successfully grabs a page. Therefore if you click the home network link and it reboots, the browser gets no page back from the device but keeps trying so that the moment the device is back up again, chrome causes it to crash.

Oddly it does this without a password being needed to get back into the admin panel which is strange as any other page request after a reboot sees a password screen displayed instead so there is definitely something odd going on if the repeated home network url can bypass that and cause it to crash again.

I'll be interested to see Bobs review of the device and what he thinks is going on. The new one seems to be good as gold so far.

[#6]

Sounds like corrupt firmware too me, its obviously not installed correctly on the last update it had, I was gunna suggest clearing out your browser cache as it might have been a corrupt bit of code in the page, clearing the cache and reloading the page would of resolved that... but if it was in the firmware it wouldnt of.

hopefully that new router resolves the issue for you...

[#7]

@bobpullen have you had chance to investigate the old router yet and reach a conclusion?

[#8]

Not yet. Set it up earlier but probably wont be back in the office until Wednesday now. Will let you know how it goes.

[#9]

Howdy @bobpullen

Do you have some news yet? like "7up, you're not mad, i'm seeing those faults too and confirm it's a dodgy device" ? lol

I'd certainly be interested to know especially after the 5GHz channel decided to play up and not turn back on!

Maybe i've discovered a bug purely by accident that will save plusnet thousands in returned and replaced routers?!

7up

[#10]

Well a fortnight after swapping routers with @bobpullen the replacement is still behaving well. Ii turned off 5GHz yesterday or the day before and tried turning it back on today, it turned on quite happily!

The "Home Network" page still works properly too.

This device seems to be the real deal. I just hope that any firmware upgrades don't screw it up.

[#11]

Hard to say @7up

Could be a firmware bug, or possibly some component had failed/played up and it is unique to your old dodgy device.

I think Bob will just check your device, and see if he can reproduce that bug on others. If he can, he'll know it'll be a problem for (is it Sagecomm?) to fix.

PlusNet will know if others have reported similar issues, if not then you've had a dead router.

I've had two die on me, and it wasn't obvious. The first, about 10 years ago, gave no ADSL light. Worked the night before. So was thinking of calling PlusNet Initially; thought it was the line and would have reported a fault. A friend of mine who lived a 10 minute walk away, had broadband through an ADSL modem (this shows your age ), connected router and tested it.

Same - no ADSL light on router. ADSL modem back in fine. So it wasn't a line fault but a dead router.

Checked in bin, got another router then fine.

Another one I had the was the 4 port switch died. No internet if you tried to use Ethernet, even with one device. Wireless was working fine, so not a line issue.

Again, that was a chuck in the bin job.

At least your problem is sorted now, but in my experience it could be strange behaviour of a faulty device. 

[#12]

I personally reckon it was a dodgy version of the firmware as the admin pages worked well enough except for that one page which was screwy and would reboot the router. Mind you with that said, if it was probing the hardware and the hardware was screwy then I suppose the firmware could have just been following instructions to reboot the device.

Either way it would be nice if @bobpullen would reply with his findings at some point as I would like to know what was wrong with the damned thing.

The new one still seems to be working well. For a basic product that came as a freebie (where I suspect costs were minimal to produce) it has some great features that many branded devices don't offer. It's a shame that it's locked to plusnet and can't have its account details used for other ISPs etc. So much for minimising electronic waste!

If anyone else reads this reply, never bin your old ISP locked routers, you can still use them as a basic network switch / WIFI AP - just disable DHCP on it.

[#13 · Accepted solution]

Sorry for the silence. I have replicated the issue, however I've not found the time to do much more with it. What interests me, is that this was a problem in the past that seemed to go away until the recent update.

I'm going to pull logs from the device over SSH if I find the time. Have been tempted to re-flash firmware to see if it goes away, but that's not going to get me any closer to establishing what the issue is.

Could be a bad component I guess. Definitely not seen any other customers reporting similar.

Have also reached out to colleagues from other areas of the business for suggestions. If I have any revelations, you'll be the first to know.

[#14]

@bobpullen thanks for the update! I'm glad to hear that you've now seen it first hand for yourself! Have you also had the 5GHz glitch that refuses to turn back on? You have no idea how frustrating that little box had been at times. I was also starting to worry that if it had been powered down for a few days in transit you might not see the fault and think i was loosing my marbles (despite the video) so I'm glad to hear back that you've tinkered with it and seen the same fault.

 The fault happened when you first sent it to us replacing a previous unit (actually possibly two according to this thread - I'd forgotten about the other(s) ), you suggested that a replacement of the replacement would see the same or similar fault so i didn't pursue it despite you offering to replace it again back then. A while later it was working as it should so I assumed it was a firmware upgrade that had fixed the glitch and that someone somewhere didn't want to admit a blunder.

Then a 4 odd weeks ago it came back and thats why i found myself thinking someone must have reverted to an old backup of the source code and pushed a defective firmware down the line to it.

I have a hunch that whoever designed this device / wrote the firmware, has more than one version of the firmware and possibly don't realise the hiccups they've caused. 

I say this because reading that old thread reminded me of something with the port forwarding. You used to (on the previously returned device) be able to select a device by its host name but then it went old-skool and only offered mac addresses. In essence the firmware appeared to have gone backwards feature wise. Then the home network page starts working.. and then ages and ages down the line, that goes back to being broken too.

If someone can accidentally go backwards with their firmware source code, it would make sense that they might be pushing out firmware updates silently without recording them in a database somewhere (eg thinking minor tweaks don't matter) and thus its possible that not even you guys in PN management are aware of this (eg someone at BT might be doing it not realising the problems they're causing) - a bit like when you make a minor change to a website / program, adjust one or two lines of code but don't bother editing the revision / version numbers. Anyway you've mentioned reaching out to colleagues so hopefully you'll track down whats going on.

With the exception of the woes that we've had with the returned device, I do think the hubone is a nice little device and has some super cool features in the admin pages.

Thanks for sorting this Bob, I'm very grateful! 

[#15]

Yep thanks @bobpullen

I can see your problem, if you flash it and the problem disappears, you know it is not hardware but software - but then you can't diagnose what it is within the software.

Is it not possible to make a backup of what is on there (easily I mean). Flash - if problem disappears, revert back to backup. If problem comes back software. If it makes no difference hardware.

I know it is one of those not easy problems, and with not many people reporting it, it is probably a lower priority than the bigger problems with people who are having problems which I am sure you have to deal with.

At least @7up has given you a task to keep you busy when you aren't.