The first beta for 8.5.2 is out today! Again the Peplink engineers have been cooking with this one! From adding improvements to download eSIM profiles to the addition of Starlink support for the USB WAN Connections.
Agent Adam and me will be going over the release notes soon and we are wondering what the community favourites are.
Switch Controller I don’t care about. That has the potential at least short term to make the “new” switch management issues worse, which I’ve discussed previously on a thread about the new switches.
The one release note I am excited about is 32014:
This one has been a VERY long time coming. It’s been a year now since this issue appeared and randomly hard locked or spontaneously rebooted our fleet (and many others) of Balance 310’s repeatedly month after month until the mentioned firmware was issued by support. After a lot of angry clients and midnight multi-hour drives to reboot those units, this is about as close to public acknowledgement of the problem as we’ve gotten so far.
Another gem is 33331. The lack of the ethernet port status page on those models was baffling. Seems like a basic feature. Glad to see it included now.
Then 33335 is important:
We’ve gotten hit multiple times by this one, especially on 8.5.1. Mainly affected our fusionhubs and UDP connections.
Then 33032…glad to see this annoyance fixed:
33424…haven’t experienced this, but it’s worth talking about for a moment. The 5GN models use Quectel modems, and Quectel was recently added the US 1260H list of prohibited vendors, meaning they are ineligible for use in covered entities, and also ineligible for FIPS certification. For some like us, this is a big deal.
Overall, 8.5.2 looks to be a rollup of bugfixes and UI tweaks for the 8.5 series, before 9.0 hits. Nothing major at all in here other than the Balance 310 kernel fix finally coming to the main firmware release.
33424 has been fun (sarcastic) for us. We have a local government client who we got switched to Peplink and, after a couple weeks, started hitting various bugs on BR1 Mini 5G (no wifi). Support issued a hotfix release which helped some, but then even today we had a device just fall offline entirely. The client is understandably concerned about the viability of Peplink in their environment and I don’t have any root cause or other detailed information from support to help me reassure the client that “yeah, shit happens, we got it sorted.” To note, there are several stability fixes these devices in the release notes and I really hope that something was shored up to bring these things out of “beta.”
Peplink has all our support but the latest releases have been damaging for the business and the lack of knowledge sharing on the existence of these bugs was a failure of our community.
Can we have an official list, maintained by Peplink, of the bugs in the official releases?
