@erutan That’s unfortunate. Strange that things went wrong with 8.2 for most of us it seems.
To answer your question, I restored my config after the factory reset. Who knows if starting from scratch does the trick…
The somewhat inconsistent behavior across different duos, which makes it harder to troubleshoot.
I’ll probably try your scorched earth approach soon - it actually isn’t that toasty since you reloaded your config (setting everything up again by hand is what I’m trying to avoid).
At this point I’m tempted to ask for upgrade pricing for a transit pro or something and trade in our Duo - this has been weeks of compromised work calls for my partner and a lot of time spent on my side and stress on hers. 
have you submitted a support ticket? if so, post the ticket # here
Ticket 22041179.
please keep us posted what they say
Will do, not much so far. I got a maintenance firmware to try out that didn’t solve the issue, and they found one misconfiguration in my DNS prefs (that I’ve had for like a year) that I fixed but that didn’t solve the connectivity issues that have cropped up.
I did another diagnostic dump and they’ll be taking a peak at it again via remote assistance soon. It feels very much like they’re in the investigative stage.
I’m being gaslit.
They’re telling me that I’ve never used speedfusion (I suppose somehow I got a license with an uneven bandwidth allowance) and want to understand my expectations for the device so they can fine-tune it for me, because apparently expecting it work as it did from November of 2020 to last month is due to a lack of understanding on my part.
It was also explained that it is now intended behavior for it to take 25 seconds to switch to an active standby connection and 5 to 20+ minutes to reset the modem to a new SIM, sometimes requiring the modem to be disabled or the device restarted.
There doesn’t seem to be any leads, but there’s a few people looking at it now. For the second time I’ve been told it’s a priority. I’m dubious that remote assistance will help solve it, as the previous two sessions and logs weren’t helpful to them, but I’ll give it a shot. Someone from the EU office asked about how to reproduce specific issues.
My options now are to continue to troubleshoot on my end by attempting the 8.13 firmware downgrade or RMA my unit and not have any router for an unspecified amount of time, which isn’t great either. I suppose in the end we’d have to buy a new router anyways to cover that time gap for my partner’s business, and then get back a functioning Duo to use as a backup or resell or something if it is a hardware issue or not something that can be diagnosed remotely, which is what it’s looking like.
No one showed up or reached out to me today. The basic flow of what happened after I opened a ticket just asking for a replacement device as after ~3 weeks my second remote assistance session ended up with “your expectations of how this device work are flawed and you’ve never used speedfusion”.
Peplink 1: This is a priority and I’ll dedicate time to this, when can I do remote assistance.
Me: I’m away from my router for a bit, here’s the next definite window, and then a possible earlier one.
Peplink 2: Hi from the EU there’s multiple people dedicated to this, sorry about the delay, can you tell me how to reproduce the issues?
Me: Sure, here’s the ones that are consistent, and the more critical one which occurs over a wide range of conditions.
Peplink 1: We’ve set up an RMA for your device, please mail it to Minnesota. Once we get it we’ll start the return process.
Me: Uh, I just got done writing up a long email on my phone to someone else detailing how to the repro the issues, how long does the RMA process take? I guess that makes sense if there’s not enough info to troubleshoot this remotely. If it leaves us without connectivity for an extended period of time it’ll end up costing more than the router, let alone the time I’ve spent on this.
Peplink 1: Look, you asked for a hardware return - we’re just doing this because you wanted it. Try setting it to firmware 8.13 and see what happens and we can remotely monitor it if you don’t want to send it in.
Me: Yeah I asked for one and then was asked to spell out how to reproduce issues, then hours later am told to just mail it in. Again what’s the time frame for the RMA process? Since there’s no record of errors in the logs and there’s been two other remote assistance sessions, will this just delay us not having the device for weeks with an RMA returned between it being mailed, received, tested, possibly fixed, mailed back, etc if I don’t mail it in? If there’s no loaner or replacement program and I’ll have to just buy a new router to cover the downtime in PrimeCare does it just make sense to do it now? There’s a forum post about someone reverting back to 8.13 and it disconnecting every 10-15 minutes, if that happens how long until I can get a new unit? Should this be my burden as someone paying for an annual support contract? It doesn’t really seem like there’s any point in remote assistance, but I’ll leave the router on for the day with remote assistance turned on if you think you can fix it remotely.
Peplink: crickets
It’s partially on me for not fully understanding the implications of manufacturer thin support > distributor > reseller flow of responsibility, and I went with an incompetent reseller due to a 10% device discount so am now pushing Peplink beyond their normal consumer support. IMO there should be some sort of explanation of this structure, and clarity over how the ticket system at peplink is supposed to work, because it’s natural to stumble across it from the forum as a consumer.
At this point I’m in the process of getting a Transit Pro from Source Inc and will pay an extra $99 a year for their extended support package including mailing out loaner units if things can’t be quickly resolved remotely. I once it’s set up I’ll just RMA the Duo since I don’t need to worry about the timing. It doesn’t seem like there’s any clear idea of why this is happening, and I wasn’t expecting to have to drop another $1200 on a router so soon especially as I’m on a paid $200 annual support contract. There’s also a decent chance I’ll lose my 100gb/$55 postpaid TMO plan.
Thats quite a wall of text. It is possible that you have it configured incorrectly. Why not let Peplink do their thing remotely? A little patience can go a long way. Chances are if its a configuration issue, you will face the same issue with the new device.
@mystery They’ve logged into it twice already, the only misconfiguration they found was fixed and wasn’t the issue. Their analysis three weeks into this ticket (and the issues started before that, but I wasn’t sure if they were transitory or local conditions) was that we had configured speedfusion correctly but had never used it despite going through 600GB of our allowance. That person also wanted to log in during the time period I said my partner was on a work VOIP calls - that‘s NOT when I want someone testing out modem resets and priority changes. I opened the ticket on April 29th, so I think it’s fair to say that I’ve had a little patience up to this point…
I‘ve provided timestamps when it failed, copied event logs for some of the secondary issues, copied over conversations about issues and our workarounds for when they happened, provided multiple diagnostic logs from both standard and maintenance firmware, configuration dumps, etc.
After I re-iterated the steps to reproduce problems on the device for someone new to the issue on Thursday, their response was to issue an RMA for it. I asked how long the process would take and was refused an answer and was told to either send it in or test out the 8.13 firmware myself despite someone else trying that and rendering their device essentially useless. Having disconnects every 10-15 minutes would be worse than the current situation we’ve been in for the past month, so it’s not something I’d eager to try although it did work for someone else. That’s not me stopping them from doing their thing remotely, that’s them opting out of it.
On that note I left the router on yesterday with remote assistance enabled as requested and notified them of that fact. I’d be happy if they fixed it remotely, but that seems unlikely at this point and I’d probably be waiting until there’s a new firmware update (whenever that may be) or RMAing it and just working off of a single carrier hotspot with a weaker antenna for an unknown period of time.
OK gotcha.
Its possible your carrier is having an issue.
There was an issue a year or so ago that impacted almost all Data plans on AT&T and it lasted 6-12 months IIRC
Its possible the issue is outside the Peplink hardware
I hope that you can get it narrowed down
Thanks!
We have SIMS for the ATT Business Wireless Broadband plan, consumer postpaid 150GB VZN plan, and a grandfathered TMO 100GB/$50mo in there.
It’s possible it’s the ATT Business Wireless plan as that’s a newer one (our previous ATT prepaid cricket plan was shut off due to “3G sunsetting and an unsupported device”).
It doesn’t seem like a carrier issue to me given the wide range of issues, but it’s not my field:
The long waits on priority switching to active standby (their solution was to never change priority, seriously) or acquiring an IP address / connection at all isn’t restricted to a single carrier. Sometimes disabling a modem works, sometimes the unit needs to be rebooted to even connect to a tower. In general the unit is far less responsive when making and applying changes. What used to take 1 second will take 30, what used to take a minute or less takes 3-5 minutes to reboot.
The unit completely freezing up and being unresponsive on WAN & LAN has occurred while using speedfusion, while on a single carrier, while using WiFi-as-WAN, when only an iPad is connected, when a laptop and phones are connected, while using VPNs and while not using VPNs. Sometimes it’ll happen a few times a day, sometimes every other day but it’s been happening for a month or so now.
There seem to be a crop of Duos with similar issues in the past month, which makes me feel it’s some interaction of hardware & 8.20 firmware. It’s possible it has something to do with the switch off of 3G, though that’s supposedly been supported since 8.13.
You got me thinking about a new course of action - I’ll ask Source on Monday if we can just buy a PrimeCare renewal from them to transfer our T1 support, then buy their additional support plan and have them look at it / send us a loaner if need be. At least if the loaner doesn’t fix the issue that’ll help narrow it down. I can pull out a ton of info from this forum and my existing ticket for them.
@erutan, sorry that your issue is still outstanding. My use case is much simpler (albeit losing connectivity is not cool because the job is 100% remote and I regularly use Teams/Slack to confer with colleagues as well as access resources via corporate VPN). Basically, a WAN for the outside, a few forwarded ports, and a reserved client list for various devices in my LAN are all I have configured. That said, I’m still on the reverted FW 8.13 and my connection has been solid for a week now… so long as I avoid WireGuard protocol available to VPN clients installed on my personal laptops.
@alembic I guess I really should try the 8.13 firmware then. Did you follow the “scorched earth method” mentioned above of reset, factory restore, 8.13 firmware restore, then config restore? Thanks for chiming back in!
My use case is actually relatively simple, it’s just that my issues are all over the place.
My partner isn’t talking with coworkers (though if you’re having disconnects every 15 minutes that doesn’t work either) - her VOIP calls are her business more or less. Luckily the one where the router just completely froze and wouldn’t come back up for a while and she had to continue via her phone wasn’t with a new client.
I’ll keep an eye on VPN usage if this does crop up again on 8.13, though that wasn’t the trigger for me on 8.20.
@erutan, if by reset, you mean pushing a button inside a pinhole on the unit (or something similar), no, I did not do that first. My procedure was a factory reset via console, 8.13 FW restore, then my config restore. It was disheartening when I got the dropouts every 10 - 15 minutes for that effort. On a whim I switched VPN protocol and only then was the router stable. I’m not considering 8.20 unless there are pressing reasons for it. e.g. security fixes.
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.
i didnt read everything but saw you think one of the modems is bad. then you can conduct your tests by swapping the carriers around and running tests on each modem. you should be able to narrow that down.
Both the SIMs in that modem would occasionally not connect when selected on a cold start and would either need to be disabled or just have the duo restarted (and the other modem would occasionally randomly restart itself, which was neat). TMO has been in use for over a year and the ATT Business Wireless Plan is being used & recommended by people on the forum for the Duo so it seems unlikely but we’ll see.
While the device definitely reads hardware info from the SIM (IMSI, ICCID, MTN) that alone shouldn’t cause things to go haywire if the SIM is disabled and has never been enabled since boot.