SRP 527w not accessible

[Oldhat_NZ]

Hi,

I recently ( three days ago ) purchased a SRP 527w and have been using it in a mixed Mac/Windows network. The setup is currently primarily using defaults apart from enabling logging. While I was still able to access the internet with some applications, accessing web content appears to have blocked after approximately 48 hours uptime.

No web pages using port 80 were available and that included the router web interface. The router would respond to ping only.

Frmware is 1.01.09

On a different note. I have to say that I find it very strange that the supplied documentation doesn't advise setting up the router using the admin login. It was only after reading one of the comments on this site that I was alerted to this security problem. I also find it rather annoying that I appear to have to purchase additional support merely to be able to download firmware updates which are designed to give the device improved functionality. 

Cheers

[biggerepps]

BTW, is there a software app like CCP (Cisco Configuration Pro) to help configure these routers?

[Andrew Hickman]

Hi Rob,

There is no such configuration tool for the SRP500.

Andy

[cwong]

I was having the same issue. I ended up return the box to the reseller. Cannot accept such unreliable product.

[barry.ocallaghan]

Hi Rob,

Just to confirm my symptoms were exactly the same, router pingable, RDP access fine, but web browsing and http access to router not working, but the good news is that since applying the SIP settings suggested by Simon it's been running solid for the last 4 days and counting...

Cheers,

Barry

[biggerepps]

Same here Barry, SIP change made on Monday, been up and running ever since (touch wood!).

I updated the firmware to 1.01.11 before the SIP was turned off. Will be waiting for a reply from Andy to say they have found the root of the prob, and has another firmware update available.  So far the modems seem to work well despite. The phone option is not being used anyway.

Users are saying the RDP and printing through the VPN are alot quicker than previously. We had Linksys WAG54G modems b4, but one site has very bad phone lines. The Linksys kept dropping out. We are changing to a wireless BBand and needed to have an ADSL and BB Wan capable routers. Nothing had VPN wich was compatable with the Linksys, so we are upgrading the lot (3 sites) with the SRP527W and SRP521W. The next option was the Cisco 877's or equivalent, but for a lot more $, which the client was reluctant to pay the extra. The 527 seems to be tolerating the lines a lot better than the Linksys. It hasn't dropped off yet!

[Andrew Hickman]

Hi Rob,

To confirm your query, we do have a fix for the issue that was causing the web access lockup - this will be made available in a new maintenance release soon (hopefully some time in November).

I would say though, that even with that fix in place, the workarounds described in the link above remain a best practice configuration if you can use them (depending on the needs of your voice service of course).

Cheers

Andy

[biggerepps]

Thanks Andy,

FYI, routers still have not dropped off since the workaround applied,

[barry.ocallaghan]

Unfortunately I've just had another outage after approx 2 weeks of uptime since disabling the VOIP lines as suggested although I'm not sure if it related to this problem.

Web browsing stopped working but I could access the web interface ok and when I checked the router status the CPU activity was constantly maxxed out at 100%. I think it was related to the DNS proxy as I could ping hostnames from the router but from connected PCs that were using the 527w for DNS I could only access sites by IP address. I'm guessing the 100% CPU usage was afftecting the DNS proxy serving requests.

I rebooted the 527w 3 times but the CPU went back to 100% a few minutes after each reboot. I ended up disconnecting all devices from the router, rebooting and reconnecting all devices and the problem went away but I still don't know what was causing the max CPU activity so I 'm not too confident that it won't happen again. CPU activity has stayed around 10% for the last hour and counting.

Any ideas what, if any, activity on the internal VLAN could max out the SRP 527w CPU, all PCs are clean of viruses and no P2P clients in use.

Barry

[Andrew Hickman]

Hi Barry,

We had a similar report to this a while ago.  At the time, this seemed to be related to a client using the first version of Safari 5.0 which used a DNS look ahead process that tended to crash router DNSd services.  Apple fixed this in a following maintenance release (5.0.1) of Safari and I haven't heard any reports of this since.

Are there any client processes on you LAN that might be having a similar impact??  As a work around, have you tried disabling DNS Proxy in the DHCP settings on the SRP?

Andy

[jettech123]

Hi

The SRP 527 has been a source of Frustration for me also.

We went from a 857 to the 527W because we required a WAN router we are using one of the LAN ports on the 527 as a WAN port couldn’t get the 521.

We seem to have the same issues as experienced by others router lockup, DHCP failure port forwards seem to be working touch wood.

The admin login wasted some of my time couldn’t work out how to firmware upgrade the router until I figured this one out. The 1.01.11 firmware hasn’t seemed to have done much to improve things.

I tried the suggested fixes turning off the SIP ports as per the post form Andy and DHCP still didn’t work. I also turned off the SIP 5060 / 5061 forwards to our SIP enabled PABX as a test. I fail too see how this is related to the issues and highly doubt we have been receiving attacks on these ports. May be the sip attack is my Mobile Softphone client trying to register to our PABX.

I understand this is a low cost entry level product but I don’t see why we should have to purchase support to make the product do what it is supposed to do.

Hopefully these issues can be resolved quickly without the need for purchasing support.

Cheers Sam

[Andrew Hickman]

Hi Sam,

It sounds like maybe you are seeing something different here.  Could you describe your issues with DHCP in a little more detail please?

The suggested workaround to the access issue required the reconfiguration of the internal SIP User Agent in the SRP500, there should be no issue with SIP traffic being forwarded through the SRP.

Andy

[jettech123]

Hi

The Port forwards to the SIP devices behind the firewall on 5060 work fine.

The DHCP symtoms I have seen is a cleint will register then have a lease time of 59 seconds then count down to 0 during this period the device dosent respond to pings.

At the Moment I can see 2 devices that have the full lease time of 6 days 22 hours and these can be pinged. Others are still popping up with the 59 second lease time also.

For now I will turn off the DHCP in vlan settings and wait for the update. After turning off the DHCP server in the router the devices that have been assigned adreseses do not respond to pings again I would have thought they would have lasted the lease time.

Some of our devices ie sonos dont have a fixed IP option.

Cheers Sam

[Andrew Hickman]

Hi Sam,

I haven't heard of this DHCP issue before.  Is there any difference between the devices (model / OS etc) that get short leases, versus those that get the full term?

I haven't specifically tested to see what happens when a DHCP rule is removed from a VLAN - but I suspect that the ARP cache / CAM table are getting flushed - did you try pinging the SRP from the DHCP client - did that work?

Andy

[matthew.cameron]

Is there updated firmware on the cards here?

We have rolled these out to many clients and we are having nothing but issues.

If there is no solution to these bugs we will be taking them our and returning them as an RA.

[Andrew Hickman]

Hi Matthew,

Yes, we have a maintenance release due sometime in the next few weeks.

Regards,

Andy