Balance One Core failing?

Product Discussion Peplink Balance
1

I have a residential Balance One Core, HW revision 1, purchased in 2020, that suddenly stopped streaming Hulu a couple weeks ago. Users can hit the Hulu website fine but receive various errors when attempting to initiate streaming (e.g., p-dev320), all of which imply connection issues.

It’s a bit bizarre because no other streaming service (Netflix, Prime, YouTube) is impacted and network tests to CloudFlare and other sites through that router show the ISP’s connection is easily hitting the 300/300 spec with very low latency/jitter and no detected packet loss. And the issue started when no network changes had occurred.

I isolated the issue to that router after testing the WAN connection directly, which streams Hulu fine, but get behind that router and it’s back. I still tried resetting the WAN via shutdown/pause/restart of the ONT, but no difference. Also tried the same with the router, which was running 8.2.0, but still there, so I then upgraded to 8.3.0, but again no difference.

Before getting into router config, it might be useful to know that I have a second Balance One Core, purchased 2017, with the exact same config (other than running 8.1.3) that I swapped in, which solved the issue.

With regard to config, no complex firewall rules. Just have 5 VLANs, all with internet access, and checkbox config of inter-VLAN routing disabled.

Thoughts? Ideas for other things to test or try?

Thanks!

2

You’ve already done a lot of testing, which may be why you don’t have any feedback yet, so here are some thoughts anyway.

The next steps I would take, and it isn’t clear that you haven’t already done this, is to save the configs on both Balance One Core routers, reset to factory defaults, then load the saved config from the second Balance One Core (yes, I know you said it was identical) into the first Balance One Core and see what happens.

Or what about loading 8.2.0 or 8.3.0 into the second Balance One to see what happens? You should still have 8.1.3 to fall back to if it is the highest revision version on the second Balance One currently.

It might also be interesting to put the Balance One’s in series: modem → Balance One → Balance One to see what happens, then reverse the test. This would require tweaking your IP address ranges since things won’t work if on the last router if it’s LAN IP address range matches that of WAN to the first router hooked to the modem.

Or what about moving ports on the first Balance One so that you are using WAN 2 for instance instead of WAN 1. A hardware issue sounds unlikely, but if you’ve tried everything else, perhaps it is worth checking.

Good luck!

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