After 8.0.0 upgrade, web UI no longer accessible on Balance 30

Hi, after my upgrade to 8.0.0 the web UI is almost never accessible anymore. After a reboot of my balance 30, it will come up, network access and my AP access points all work fine, but the web UI access from my browser just times out. Occasionally I get lucky and I can log in into the web UI, but even when logged in the UI often freezes. It seems to me the CPU gets constantly pegged at 100%, and as a result the UI is frozen, and CPU cycles are directed to actually managing network traffic.

I have 6 peplink APs that I managed with the Balance 30, three WAN connections, and one VLAN on the LAN 4 port, and one PepVPN connection to a Balance One.

7.1.2 managed this pretty well, the UI would occasionally become unresponsive, but a reboot would fix that. 8.0.0 is WAY worse, or I would say basically unusable.

The way I did manage to login to the UI is to unplug the 6 APs and two of the WAN connections and then power cycle the Balance 30. Then once logged in, plug in the 6 APs. That mostly works, I still see long spikes of frozen UI.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!
Barthold

How many LAN clients? What is the sum of the upload/download bandwidth for your 3 WAN links? How much traffic is over the VPN?

A good place to start is to make sure these recommendations are followed and confirm you have the correct size router for your network.

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Hi Ron,

Great points. I have about 30 LAN clients, 20 of those spread over the 6 APs. Sum of the three WAN links is 38 Mbps down, 28 Mbps up (so not really fast). There is basically no traffic over the VPN, other than what is needed to keep the link up. I only use that link occasionally.

Note, the real trouble started after the 8.0.0 upgrade. 7.1.2 was much much better. So something changed in the latest firmware.

I did some more experimentation. Even with only a few LAN clients connected to the balance 30 with a network cable, one AP and only one WAN connection, I still cannot log into the UI. I don’t even get the UI login screen. However, network routing works fine. I can browse the web. Speedtest shows typical values.

Any ideas?

Some more information. Managed to get into the UI by disconnecting some more stuff from the balance 30 lan ports. Several seconds after I plugged the second WAN connection back into the balance30, the UI froze up, and now I cannot even get the login screen again. I’ve seen this before, so it starts to point at something to do with handling multiple WAN connections. Ron, would that make any sense to you?

Does everything work consistently with WAN 2 disconnected?

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Somewhat, but not very well, see my first post.

Something is not right. You may want to open a support ticket with us here to investigate the issue.

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I went back to 7.1.2. Full configuration, everything connected, works fine.

Did you submit a ticket?

Yup I did!

@Ron_Case Well, to make a long story short. After hours of trying I cannot get 8.0.0 to work. So I am finally (with a lot of effort) back on 7.1.2. This means Peplink cannot do much debugging, although they have asked for access to my 7.1.2 config.

8.0.0 was so bad that not even the factory reset button would work (yes I held it down for 30 seconds, tried twice).

To get out of this jam I bought a Balance One Core router to replace the Balance30, which I would not have done was it not for the 8.0.0 debacle. Furthermore, Peplink also tells me that I cannot even load my Balance30 config into the Balance One Core. They offered to convert the config for me, but they say it would take so long I’d be better off doing it manually myself :frowning: More time wasted.

This is just bad customer service.