GL AR750S-EXT Dropping WAN as Repeater Hourly

dham · 2022-01-22T03:20:11.692Z

Greetings, and I know this is something I have seen in older issues, but seems to be an issue with mine and I have only had it a couple weeks. At first I set it up as a repeater to a Cellualr hotspot to extend it. I have had the hotspot for many years without issue even with it maxed out on the connected devices. When I connected this to it, it did so without issue and seemed to run fine for a week ad so I started adding more devices and within a day or so it started dropping it internet. I need the internet for remote work, and it would just stop while I was working, or seemingly at random. I initially enabled auto update and so I checked that it updated and it had updated to 3.211 (I think it was). Restarting seems to at least make me think it was working, but it eventually would stop and after about a minute reconnect. I plugged my laptop to the ethernet port and disabled the wifi so to make sure it stayed active. I started a continuous ping to the inside interface and one to the interface of the hotspot, and then another to an external site that I know pings reliably. I also keep my VPN conencted to my work, so when my VPN complains that it is try to reconnect I know the internet has dropped. My ping to the inside Ethernet port of the GL still pings sucesffully but the ping to the hotspot and external site fail. About a minute later they start again, as the GL has reconnected to the hotpot. When there is a disconnect, I can access the management page and see that there is no device in the repeater section of the Internet page, and Repeater cannot be clicked on. It stays gray. Eventually it reconnects and my hotspot shows up again. So this tells my the repeater is disconnecting and reconnecting itself. I have never had my hotspot do this to any of my phones or computers. I have used it the same way for many years now, and when I see my VPN disconnect and eventually reconnect it disconnects me from what I am doing. Also if we try to use this instead of the hotspot for cell phones, they will drop in the middle of conversations, while if connected to my hotspot they will not. I have tried rolling back the firmware to 3.203 and I am still having the issues. Looking at my VPN logs, I can see the reconnect times about about 50 to 60 minutes apart +/-. It will do so even when nobody is home using this for anything else. Also I have noticed that I have no Status section under More Options to looks for logs like I have seen others point out to check on. I did see older threads about similar issues, however I would have expected this to be a resolved issue by now. Any ideas?

alzhao · 2022-01-22T03:33:18.534Z

To summary, your AR750s breaks from your carrier hotspot from time to time.

When this happens, can you ssh to the router and get the log using “logread”?

dham · 2022-01-22T05:10:39.441Z

Thank you, I was able to obtain the log. Do I email it to you or should I post it, or is there a way to upload/attach it?

alzhao · 2022-01-22T06:08:05.686Z

If you can post here pls do it.

Otherwise write email to support@gl-inet.com

dham · 2022-01-22T06:44:12.401Z

Unfortunately the log would not go into the post as it was to large. I also had another disconnect right when trying to send to your email. Bad timing. One thing I wonder is that when I verified the WIFI frequencies, my hotspot was broadcasting channel 1, and so was the AR750S on the 4G SID. I can understand why it would need to use channel 1 to connect to my hotspot but shouldn’t it use a different channel for its WIFI?
Also my second attempt was returned as undeliverable, so I am trying again.

alzhao · 2022-01-22T07:47:58.476Z

dham:

I can understand why it would need to use channel 1 to connect to my hotspot but shouldn’t it use a different channel for its WIFI?

AR750s has two radios, one for 2.4G and one for 5G.

One radio can only work in one frequency (channel). So when you use it as repeater to connect to your existing wifi (for example 2.4G), both the station and ap interface change the channel because they all use the same radio. But 5G wifi is not affected. So you need to use 5G to work as AP.

dham · 2022-01-22T17:09:54.802Z

Ok, thanks. I look forward to hear back about a resolution to the disconnects.

dham · 2022-02-24T06:27:01.859Z

Once I moved most of my devices over the 5G wifi the device started to stabilize. A couple days ago I added one more device to the 5G wifi and now it is starting to reset the WAN connection again. I would like to know if there is a maximum number of devices that can connect to each wifi?

alzhao · 2022-02-24T09:50:03.556Z

dham:

like to know if there is a maximum number of devices that can connect to each wifi?

How many devices do you have on 5G? Are there heavy data usage?

It is more seems trouble with a device, not the maximum number.

dham · 2022-02-24T15:58:34.596Z

4 or sometimes 5. One computer that is used only occasionally, 1 of 2 phones that do not stream, and 1 smart TV that is rarely used for streaming at all, and one streaming device. After adding the new device was when it started happening again, and this morning 4 or 5 times in the last hour.

alzhao · 2022-02-25T08:43:17.262Z

dham:

After adding the new device

4 to 5 is not a problem at all.

Do you think the problem is related to this particular device?

dham · 2022-02-25T18:17:58.319Z

I have never used another device to repeat my existing AP. Also I enabled the 5G guest sid, and then moved the streaming device and 1 phone to that. I now have one device using the 4g sid, 3 configured to use the 5g sid and 2 to use the 5g guest sid, and things seem to be Ok. The device I have connected to the 4g sid, is my laptop, and I have the web admin page for the Gl-iNet on it. when there are issues I look at the Internet tab in the GL-Inet and the AP that I connect to from the GL-iNet is grayed out. If I wait for 10 to 15 seconds, it will eventually reconnect. I have only had to manually reconnect it myself, as it typically does so. I have never had this type of thing happen with any device I have connected directly to my AP directly. It seems only to happen with this GL-iNet when I have 4 or more devices connected to one sid. Spreading them out seems to help. However I have only been working this way for a day. How I know it does this, is my VPN log on my one laptop. Typically is is connected all the time due to the work I perform. Connected to my AP it never drops unless I myself manually restart the AP. However when connected to the GL-Inet I can use the log and see reconnect messages and while any device connected to the AP keeps working while devices connected to the GL-iNet lose access until the GL-iNet’s WAN reconnects to the AP.
Again spreading out the devices to different sids seem to help. I will know later today, but as of this morning it was stable. As for the number of devices that actually stream things like video, we only use one at a time. No more than 2. Just normal browsing and email. I hope this helps and makes sense.