RV042 slows down and finally stops

daleconn1 · ‎12-21-2011

I recently took over at a company as IT Manager. All through my career I have heard about the quality of Cisco equipment. Over the past few years I have used a few different Cisco products with good success. When I took over they were using an assortment of old D-link DI-604UP's & DI-804HV routers. The problem is that most of the DSL Internet connections now are faster than the 10 megs that these units WAN connections support. Since they were working fine other than that I felt that replacing them with the RV042 would be a good step. So far I have purchased 6 & implemented 5 of them. The sites vary in number of network devices from 10 to about 50.

The problem is that 4 of the 5 routers start to slow down & finally stop responding after a period of time. If I unplug them, count to 10 & plug them in again they work fine again for a period of time & then quit. The length of time varies between sites & even varies on the same unit. They may go for 2 days or 2 weeks. I never know what I'm going to get. When they go down I don't even have local access to them. It's like they overload & can't accept any more data. I can't tell you what version of firmware they originally had but I can tell you I had upgraded 3 of them to version 4.0.4.02 & then to version 4.1.0.02. I reset & manually re-entered all the settings after I did this.

I have read through the posts & have changed the MTU settings & tried disabling the SPI firewall setting to no avail. The D-link routers ran flawlessley until I replaced them & have done so since I put them back.

I now have over $1000.00 dollars worth of routers that I can't use. I have a boss that is on me because I talked him into spending the money when the $200.00 dollars worth of routers I replaced were working fine.

I have 10 locations to upgrade the total infrastructure in. Routers, switches, etc. If I don't get this resolved quick there is no way in the world I be buying any more Cisco equipment.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

macarrut · ‎12-22-2011

Hello Dale,

I am sorry to hear that you have been having this issue. I would like to look into this issue further for you to see what we can find out. From your post it looks like of the 6 routers you have purchased, you have implemented 5 of them. Of these 5 routers you have implemented 4 of them are experiencing this same issue. There is a possiblity that these routers may be from the same batch of routers, which would indicate that it may be a bad batch of routers. If it would be possible for you get me the Serial Numbers from each of the units that are having this issue I could go ahead and check on this for you.

Also, do you have any information on the router that has not yet been implemented? If you switch out one of the routers that is having an issue for this 6th router does the issue persists with the 6th router?

If you do not want to post your Serial Numbers here you can send them to me in an email and I will get those checked out for you.

daleconn1 · ‎12-22-2011

NKS11140312

NKS11120916

NKS11100363

I can't access the others remotely right now.

More news. I did the firmware update this morning on NKS11140312 & it stop working in under 2 hours. The 6th router NKS11100363 was the one I had in the local office & was the first to give me the problems. I have switched it out with one of the others NKS1120916.

I have one working reliably. It is in the network with only 10 devices connected to a 1.5Meg DSL connection. It is also the only one that the firmware updates have not been done on. Sorry I can't get it's serial number of it right now.

I guess the real concern is that after I started having these problems I started searching the net & these types of problems are rampant with your RV series.

I quote one fellows commnet: "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I can empathize and tell you that we've had similar issues with RV016's. They're just not reliable, even with the latest firmwares. We ended up switching to Microsoft's TMG, and it runs rock solid. It's more flexible and integrates with AD well. On the downside, the TCO is higher. Perhaps you could offload the RV042 on eBay, or the like, and invest in an enterprise-grade firewall / VPN router"

Since they are Cisco products it never ocured to me that I needed to check up on them before purchasing. It used to be you paid the extra to get Cisco reliability. Considering the amount of time they have been on the market you would think you would have all the bugs worked out by now.

I purchased a mature Cisco product to evade all these difficulties & frankly I don't have time to experiment with you. It also concerns me that you would so quickly jump to the bad batch theory. It makes me think you have had many bad batches. I need this fixed now so give me a fix that gets them working or arrange to let my supplier refund my money & sell me something that works.

macarrut · ‎12-22-2011

Please give us a call at 866-606-1866 and speak with the next available engineer so that we can provide you immediate assistance. We are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, including holidays.

daleconn1 · ‎01-03-2012

I've been away for a few days & didn't want to deal with this over Christmas. We put the D-Link routers back in to the really unrealiable or hard to get to spots for the Christmas break. I will be calling tomorrow but I wanted to post this for anyone who has been following this discusion.

The router connected to the 25M down 2M up connection that was locking up after a couple of hours wasn't going to be used too much over the holiday so we tried an experiment. We had the backup router there just in case:

I changed the MTU to manual & set it to 1450. I went into port management / port setup & turned off auto negotiation on the wan port & lan port that I'm using. Now the router doesn't lock up. What happens is it starts at close to the top speeds available & then slows down to about 8.5M down & 1.5M up. It ran at that speed for almost 10 days. We cold booted it yesterday & it went back up to the faster speeds & then slowly started slowing down again.