It’s worrisome that you still have a buggy unit after downgrading to 8.13 - it wasn’t disconnecting from wireguard before you tried 8.20 right? Somehow that behavior was carried over despite the firmware downgrade.
So I did the soft reset, factory defaults, firmware 8.13, then another factory defaults and firmware 8.13 for good measure. Basic reset and initialization times didn’t seem to change radically once I imported my config from testing it vanilla.
Starting up (give or take 10s):
VZN connects in a minute. 3 minutes after turning on the router the other modem reset itself trying to initialize then connected in minute or so later. Which isn’t that bad these days.
On the second round both modems initialized in a minute.
Third time VZN initialized in a minute, TMO took another two minutes but also reset itself.
Fourth time, ATT connected in 10 seconds from AP initialization (!!) and 10 seconds before incontrol time sync. VZN connected it’s usual ~1m later.
Fifth time, VZN it’s usual ~1min, ATT 1m30s later.
SIM switches / reset modem:
Manually resetting a modem from TMO to ATT took over four minutes.
When manually resetting a modem from ATT to TMO it took over four minutes to get a connection on ATT.
Second time, resetting the modem from TMO to ATT took 5 minutes. Resetting ATT to TMO took 4 1/2 minutes.
I wish I had event logs saved from 2020 to March of 2022, I feel like resets used to take ~2 minutes, similar to an initialization when turning the unit on, but this is a minor issue if the unit doesn’t randomly freeze up anymore.
Resetting from an empty sim to VZN took a little over a minute, which sounds about right. I don’t have the energy now, but I’ll try putting the ATT SIM in with VZN and bounce them around and see if that causes the time to shoot up to 4-5 minutes.
Disable / re-enabling priority switches take ~20s which is normal.
Priority switching:
Hot standby changes are taking 5+ seconds in the UI but the event log says all the steps happened within a second or two. That’s an improvement as they would erratically vary from 3s to 30s in 8.20. According to the event log changing priorities between VZN & ATT and VZN & TMO is going smoothly.
Initial thoughts:
Initially this is promising though the worst behavior was really erratic on 8.20 and would either manifest when initially starting the router or the freezes with no discernible rhyme or reason over time.
Somewhat regularly on 8.20 on initialization ATT would not connect, other times TMO would not connect, VZN would keep resetting itself, etc, sometimes with both modems not behaving at once, sometimes just one. Obtaining an IP address and initialization usually weren’t the problems vs it just staying on “connecting”.
I wonder if one of the modems is a bit bad - last fall there were some times where it occasionally wouldn’t detect the SIM card for TMO. Peplink was never able to replicate this, and it stopped happening after a while, but I wonder if something in the 8.20 firmware was reacting to a hardware defect in one of the modems that for whatever reason has more minor side effects 8.13. I feel like I might just be stuck on 8.13 for life. Even if this does end up working I think I’ll still hop on the Source Inc plan.
I also thought I had fixed the issue after doing a factory reset and config restore at the beginning of the month on 8.20 and then it came back worse, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens as time goes on. Perhaps just repeatedly doing factory resets and config restores every week or two will be the new norm, or perhaps there won’t be lingering aftereffects.