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My TP-Link ER605 is playing silly buggers

dazmatic

ULTIMATE Member
I've got a couple of servers, Plex/Nextcloud etc set up for remote access over my Three via the ER605 router.

Previously, with the Draytek, it posed no issues - ever.

Now, with the ER605, the open ports are seemingly randomly closing by themselves and then opening again.

My mum wanted to watch something on Plex and was seemingly having issues with it not connecting, losing connection and she was calling me up saying she couldn't get into it. I'd have a look, it would suddenly start working and just attributed it to a gremling.

Now that I'm trying to watch something on plex, I'm getting the same issue.

I've confirmed this with canyouseeme whilst watching something on Plex.

The video stopped, checked canyouseeme and port was closed.
Via 4G on my phone couldn't access nextcloud, checked canyouseeme, port was closed.

There's literally no reason for them to open for a period of time, and then close?

Any ideas as it's got me baffled!
 
Yeah, saw that after I posted and updated it.

Does appear to be a little snappier now and a random test just now worked.

The real test is if I can watch something on Plex without it crapping out.
back at work tomorrow so I'll have a chance to find out.
 
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Let us know how it's performing, I've already seen on Reddit someone's had to factory reset theirs.
Checking this morning, it's still playing up - I'll be pissed if I have to factory reset for sure.

Presumably, if I reset, I can't use the recovery config for the sake of repeating the same issue potentially.

It's not great really for a prosumer grade piece of kit to not be able to keep ports open.
Got half a mind to box it and return it, can now get an ER-X for not much more gold now.
 
I've always thought of TP-Link as a consumer-grade brand in terms of hardware, software/firmware quality, and testing, notwithstanding that they try to sell to businesses.

Historically I've regarded Netgear to be a better brand than TP-Link but Netgear's issues with their 5G NR hardware has encouraged me to consider industrial devices where uptime and stability are critical.
 
I've always thought of TP-Link as a consumer-grade brand in terms of hardware, software/firmware quality, and testing, notwithstanding that they try to sell to businesses.

Historically I've regarded Netgear to be a better brand than TP-Link but Netgear's issues with their 5G NR hardware has encouraged me to consider industrial devices where uptime and stability are critical.
I had some netgear stuff once...
 
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How about that - it's almost on the on dot 12/13 minutes past the hour, it starts working for 30 minutes ish, and then stops for 30 minutes.
 
Docker - no
Windows - yes

However I wasn't aware that setting a controller would remove the ability to locally administer.

Nor did I know it was going to completely reconfigure the device to a different subnet meaning I can no longer access anything - not even the windows virtual machine with the controller access.
 
Well that was a massively inconvenient faff.

Turns out in setting up the controller, it reset/reconfigured the router for no reason other than it can meaning I lost access to both the router and the controller on a VM and the controller also lost access to the router.

A factory reset, reconfigure of the controller and router later and we're back up and running again.

God forbid if I want to get rid of the controller and go back to managing the router directly.

Good news however, it would appear the ports are staying open.
 
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On the topic of TP link, I have a switch and two eap's in a mesh. I upgraded to 5.8.4 omada controller, running in a vm. The interface was sluggish, and one of my wifi devices refused to connect, despite working for months before the ug. After trying to downgrade the controller to 5.7.4 without success, I trashed and restored the vm to an earlier copy, with 5.7.4 installed, now its working, and the gui is a lot snappier. Also if I recall there was an eap firmware upgrade, which disappeared after a few days (didn't do the upgrade due to operational requirements) to reappear sometime later, and installed ok. Methinks TP have a QA issue. BTW the switch & eaps are consumer & business model (probaby just sales talk!!)
 
I've had to bin off the local server - it wasn't practical and slow as ass.

After resetting the device again, it would appear to be stable now - perhaps I should have done so when updating from original factory firmware to latest but you'd like to think that configuration variables wouldn't have had an effect.
 
To my surprise (as a moderately skilled techie) my old draytek and my 605 have UDP flood protection turned on by default.

My symptom was that my work VPN connection would be extremely slow at transferring files, there was a configured quota and time period of UDP packets on both devices which would be hit by the VPN + file transfer and it would throttle the transfer of UDP packets.
 
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To my surprise (as a moderately skilled techie) my old draytek and my 605 have UDP flood protection turned on by default.

My symptom was that my work VPN connection would be extremely slow at transferring files, there was a configured quota and time period of UDP packets on both devices which would be hit by the VPN + file transfer and it would throttle the transfer of UDP packets.

Could this impact MS Teams calls? Ever since switching to the ER605 both myself and my partner have had issues with MS Teams calls - not incoming, but out going. We would apparently freeze, or our video quality would be terrible.

Granted, were on 4G but our upload bandwidth is 20Mbps+ easily so there's no question about bandwidth.

But, with several different modems, different companies, different computers, different VPNs etc, the only constant has been the 605.

Now I'm
 

And that's the last we heard of Dazmatic, the police are still making enquiries, but the 605 is the prime suspect.
🙃

Kidding aside, is there any way to bypass the 605 temporarily, at least for the work traffic, and see if it improves things? You can't be sure until you do that. It could be Three gone wonky.
 
Must have been a bit of premature netjaculation there.

I've just setup a gateway ACL rule for MS teams ports, both incoming and outgoing. I kind of get the impression the Omada hardware uses slightly different terminology for the same thing.

A test call this morning seemed to work OK but will see how I get on.

Also changed the MTU setting of the VLAN on the mikrotik interface to 1380 to match the LTE interface, and the WAN port on the ER605. Didn't change it like a numpty and it basically went 1380 at WAN, 1500 at mikrotik VLAN, 1380 at LTE interface which is not ideal.
 
Must have been a bit of premature netjaculation there.

I've just setup a gateway ACL rule for MS teams ports, both incoming and outgoing. I kind of get the impression the Omada hardware uses slightly different terminology for the same thing.

A test call this morning seemed to work OK but will see how I get on.

Also changed the MTU setting of the VLAN on the mikrotik interface to 1380 to match the LTE interface, and the WAN port on the ER605. Didn't change it like a numpty and it basically went 1380 at WAN, 1500 at mikrotik VLAN, 1380 at LTE interface which is not ideal.
What's the MTU on the client interfaces (i.e. where some of the packets are produced)?

Can ping be used to test that the largest expected packets pass?

Intermediate hops don't really matter and can be set as high as you like. Even jumbo frame size is fine (probably even preferable for internal traffic).
 
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