I installed a Balance 30 at our main office about a year ago. About 45 days ago, the Balance would stop responding to external requests (only certain mapped ports) … the IPSec VPN connection to our remote office would disconnect and my remote office Balance router would start screaming at me saying that link has been dropped. The Balance 30 never generated an error message indicating any error with itself (which for WAN connections this is set up correctly).
Additionally, when the Balance 30 stops responding to external requests, it stops responding to LAN requests (i.e., you cannot access the login page and cannot ping it)… we use a lot of remote desktop and VNC tools, we CAN pass through the router to the LAN client using VNC, but only on -some- mapped TCP connections, not all of them.
The only way to correct whatever the issue is with the Balance 30 is to power cycle it. It’s back to normal. It may last six hours, or three days before another issue crops up.
It fails at random times in the evening, sometimes during the day, sometimes at 5am when very little traffic is passing through it.
WAN1 is my primary connection through the cable modem
WAN2 is my always-on backup
WAN3 is a secondary always-on connection through the cable modem, which I installed as an experiment to see if I could access the Balance 30 during one of its ‘fits’
Additionally, I turned on the SSH on port 8822 and tested the username/password of my admin account -before- any errors happened, which worked fine. I was able to reboot the Balance 30 using the SSH server.
When I received the email from my remote router (a Balance 20) yesterday saying the PepVPN had failed, I tried to log in using SSH 8822. The login username/password prompts came up as they did before when I tested it, entered ‘admin’ for my admin account, as usual… BUT, when I put my admin account password in, it would NOT take the password. I threw every password I had at that prompt and it still never logged in. There’s something else weird going on with this router if that is the case, but, if it doesn’t generate some kind of error for me from some kind of self diagnostic, how am I supposed to troubleshoot it? I don’t think it’s a load issue, as the Balance 30 doesn’t fail under huge amounts of traffic, for example, my nightly backup of a 4GB database from the remote office to this one.
I have no aircard in the USB port, I don’t use it.
Under normal circumstances, it’s set-it-and-forget-it, which I have up until a little over a month ago. I have run it up to 90 days straight without a reboot. Before I throw this in the trash and go out and buy a newer Balance box, has anyone had this problem? I’m very concerned that my admin/password in the SSH shell did not work, although once you power cycle the router, it is like nothing ever happened – everything returns to normal.
Help requested. Thank you in advance for anything you can tell me. I’ve been as descriptive as I can be (I hope).
-BT