RV180 dropping connections every 10 minutes or so

[asolochek]

I have a cisco RV180 hooked up to a  cisco cable modem and Cox service. 

The basic symptoms of the problem are that every 10 minutes or so external connections will hang.  This lasts maybe 20-60 seconds.  If you're loading a website when this happens, various parts of it won't load and firefox will sit and spin indefinitely (it seems) until you manually stop the loading and click the reload button.

When this is happening I can still connect to the routers webserver and dashboard that auto-refreshes every 10 seconds.  It seems perfectly fine.  My initial theory was that something was broken on the Cox end of things, but after swapping out the RV180 with an old on-q router we had laying around, we haven't seen the problems. 

Some other differences I've noticed between the on-q and the rv180:

* with the rv180 traceroute to external hosts shows a big delay (500-600ms) at the hop right after the router.  With the on-q, it's 12ms. 

* when I ping the ip of that hop with the large delay, with the on-q I get no responses.  With the rv180 I would get these strange host redirect messages that make it look like that ip is redirecting to itself.  There would be 1 or 2 of those redirect responses, followed by 3 or 4 errors, and every packet would be listed as an error in the ping summary. 

Does anyone have ideas of what to try to further debug this problem?

Thank you.

-Aaron

[linksysinfo]

Aaron Solochek wrote:
Does anyone have ideas of what to try to further debug this problem?
Thank you.
-Aaron

Turn on the Logging and enable every feature.  Then view the loogs and look of any errors. is the RV180 picking up all relevant DHCP/DNS info from the cable modem?

Is the cablemodem issuing the same IP address range as the LAN IP address range on the RV180 perhaps?

Regards Simon
http://www.linksysinfo.org

[asolochek]

Long wait for a reply, but it took a while to find a decent opportunity to swap the RV180 back in to test. 

I reset it to factor defaults, then assigned it it's static LAN ip, and turned off the dhcp server on it.  I turned on all logging, and nothing shows up when the problem arrives, but these are the logs I have gotten:

Alerts: (seem to all be from when I booted)

Wed Aug  1 04:50:10 2012(GMT) [rv180][Kernel][KERNEL] [   93.980000] pgd = c1d5c000

Wed Aug  1 04:50:10 2012(GMT) [rv180][Kernel][KERNEL] [   93.980000] [00000000] *pgd=01eeb031, *pte=00000000, *ppte=00000000

Wed Aug  1 04:50:11 2012(GMT) [rv180][Kernel][KERNEL] [   96.400000] pgd = c1d5c000

Wed Aug  1 04:50:11 2012(GMT) [rv180][Kernel][KERNEL] [   96.400000] [00000000] *pgd=01f29031, *pte=00000000, *ppte=00000000

Wed Aug  1 04:50:12 2012(GMT) [rv180][Kernel][KERNEL] [   98.700000] pgd = c1d5c000

Wed Aug  1 04:50:12 2012(GMT) [rv180][Kernel][KERNEL] [   98.700000] [00000000] *pgd=01fe1031, *pte=00000000, *ppte=00000000

Wed Aug  1 04:50:13 2012(GMT) [rv180][Kernel][KERNEL] [  100.990000] pgd = c1d5c000

Wed Aug  1 04:50:13 2012(GMT) [rv180][Kernel][KERNEL] [  100.990000] [00000000] *pgd=01f46031, *pte=00000000, *ppte=00000000

Error:

Sat Jan  1 00:02:13 2011(GMT) [rv180][Kernel][KERNEL] [    1.890000] rtc irq:23

Wed Aug  1 08:58:58 2012(GMT) [rv180][System][VIPSECURE] Invalid exchange type 243 from 186.136.142.240[500].

Wed Aug  1 08:58:59 2012(GMT) [rv180][System][VIPSECURE] Invalid exchange type 243 from 186.136.142.240[500].

Wed Aug  1 08:59:01 2012(GMT) [rv180][System][VIPSECURE] Invalid exchange type 243 from 186.136.142.240[500].

Wed Aug  1 08:59:06 2012(GMT) [rv180][System][VIPSECURE] Invalid exchange type 243 from 186.136.142.240[500].

Wed Aug  1 11:02:57 2012(GMT) [rv180][System][VIPSECURE] Invalid exchange type 243 from 142.0.238.11[500].

Wed Aug  1 11:03:00 2012(GMT) [rv180][System][VIPSECURE] Invalid exchange type 243 from 142.0.238.11[500].

Wed Aug  1 11:03:04 2012(GMT) [rv180][System][VIPSECURE] Invalid exchange type 243 from 142.0.238.11[500].

Wed Aug  1 15:57:09 2012(GMT) [rv180][System][PLATFORM] IP:       XXXX

Wed Aug  1 15:57:09 2012(GMT) [rv180][System][PLATFORM] BCAST:    XXXX

Wed Aug  1 15:57:09 2012(GMT) [rv180][System][PLATFORM] SUBNET:   255.255.252.0

Wed Aug  1 15:57:09 2012(GMT) [rv180][System][PLATFORM] GW:       XXXX

Wed Aug  1 15:57:09 2012(GMT) [rv180][System][PLATFORM] DNS1:     XXXX

Wed Aug  1 15:57:09 2012(GMT) [rv180][System][PLATFORM] DNS2:     XXXX

Wed Aug  1 15:57:09 2012(GMT) [rv180][System][PLATFORM] Interface:eth1

And then there are lots of warning logs, but again those all seem to have come from boot and don't change when the problems occur.

I think I might get another one of these and see if maybe I got a bad piece of hardware.

-Aaron

[asolochek]

I received a new RV180 yesterday, running an older firmware version.  I set it up, again only changing the local ip, and dhcp settings, and again it caused many web pages to hang while loading. 

This router was running an older firmware version, 1.0.0.something.  I can't remember exactly which, and I can't check right now since I removed it to restore decent network connectivity. 

I'm really at a loss here.  Certainly these routers can't all have this problem or people would be up in arms over it, but I also can't think of what would make my network so unusual. 

What alternative product would people recommend, Cisco or otherwise?  I'm really disappointed because I was hoping for an easy solution that would give me NAT, QoS for our guest vlan, and VPN.

[Tom Watts]

Who is your ISP and what kind of internet is it?

-Tom

[asolochek]

The ISP is Cox in Las Vegas, and the service is 50Mbit residential service.  The cable modem, which was replaced when we first started having problems, is the cisco DPC3010, and the other side of the RV180 is a cisco SG300-10P which has a couple of computers, and a couple of Aironet 1042s.

[Tom Watts]

Aaron,  connect your computer directly to the modem, get the internet to work, navigate a few sites, etc. Reconnect the router to the modem, then connect your computer to the router. Log the router, clone the MAC address of your computer to the router WAN IP address.

-Tom

[asolochek]

Tom, I'll give that a try.  The problem is kind of inconsistent, so I'll have to do it when I have a lot of time to test it.

Do you have a theory as to what is happening, or is this just a standard debugging step?

[Tom Watts]

Honest answer, I don't know your problem.You have already finished the obvious, flash/upgrade the firmware and reset the unit. This is an usual troubleshoot step.

Given benefit to the stability of the internet connection and to the ISP, to troubleshoot from the router point of view, it is best to go with what you know is working.

Statement example: My computer connects to the modem and never has a problem, but my router to the modem has a problem.

This idea is we can put the computer MAC to the router WAN to emulate the connection to see if it alleviates.

You have already finished the obvious, flash/upgrade the firmware and reset the unit.

After the MAC clone, you may want to investigate port negotiation issues such as connect an umanage switch between the modem and router to see if there is stability.

-Tom

[mpyhala · Accepted solution]

Aaron,

Browse to Firewall-> Attack Checks and uncheck everything. If that helps start checking things and see if one of the options causes the problem. You should also do an MTU test:

http://www6.nohold.net/Cisco2/ukp.aspx?pid=80&vw=1&articleid=386

You may need to adjust the MTU on the WAN port to something other than 1500 (Default)

I have an RV180W connected to a DCP3010 on Charter Cable and it works PERFECT. I replaced my old Docsis 2.0 modem that was having some issues.

Keep us updated.

- Marty

[asolochek]

So I turned off all the firewall attack checks last night, and haven't yet noticed any problems.  Hopefully this has solved the problem.  I want to continue to test it for a couple more days before I declare victory though. 

I'll let you know how that turns out.

Thanks.

[asolochek]

Ok, I am declaring victory over this!  It's one of the firewall attack prevention settings.  Eventually I may narrow it down to figure out which causes the problems, but now I will move on to other issues in a new thread.

Thanks!

[vincent.yim]

I'm having the same problem as Aaron. I tried to follow your instruction to uncheck everything in the firewall attack prevention but it doesn't help at all. I searched the forum and the internet for quite some time and found that it also happens to RV220W as well. Seems like the whole series is having the same bug. And it's been there for long with no perminant fix.

After spending so much time (and money) on the RV180W, I found it isn't the right router for me. I can only use it as a wireless AP. A very expensive AP!!!

1. Web page doesn't load when I'm using LAN connection

2. There's no way to setup an IPsec VPN connection with my iPhone and iPad

3. No Wake on LAN feature to turn on my PC remotely. Magic packet cannot pass thru

I'm giving up now and I'm going to buy a Draytek or an Asus router instead. The problem is I can't sell the RV180W because no one wants it. All my money was wasted.

[kogashuko]

If you are still having this issue, I figurered out a fix for mine which is holding strong so far. Under "Firewall", "Advanced Settings", and "Session Setting." I added 99 in front of all of the timeout settings. The settings do not specify if they are in seconds or what. However, my airave was timing out at the 10 minute mark. The way I figured the time out was interesting. I connected to battlefield 3, which must use similar ports as my airave, and was getting disconnected at the same time the airave was. Interesting part was that the streaming music from slacker was not effected. I would assume that this setting was not meant to close an active connection but it obviusly works that way. I have attached a photo to show my changes. Hope this helps.

[bigides1979]

I have the same exact issue as described by Aaron. I am going to try the uncheck method and the session timeout method.

It has driven me nuts at times. You almost have to click on stop and refresh on every other page. I hope one of these methods work!