Saturday 22 April 2017

Virgin Superhub 2 to Superhub 3 change

I had issues with my Superhub 2 around Christmas, it was replaced and this worked OK for a while but I noticed the replacement was not a new unit (refurbished?), after a couple of months I would experience very slow web page access (on wired or wireless) and randomly the internal connection to the hub would drop, the only way to restore the connection (and access to the internet was through a power cycle). I did the usual things of restoring factory settings and also the reset button (hold for 20 seconds), the hub would always work for a random period, then drop the connection, If I tried to ping the hub it simply wasn't there.

The randomness was very annoying, sometimes I would wake up in the morning and be the only person on the hub (apart from any devices doing housekeeping - Android phones etc.), I would click on a web page and sometimes it would work fine, other times I would get the dreaded slowdown then the connection would time out.

The main issue I had was talking to Virgin support, I'm quite confident the issue was their hub, if I make no other changes to any device on the network but power cycle the hub then it all works.

I have a HP Microserver plugged directly into the hub, this drops connection as well - everything drops from the hub. I found the Virgin Tech quite sarcastic, he told me there was no fault, he could connect to the hub and from his perspective there was no fault, another person told me the frequencies were a little "off" and that would fix it - I fail to see how an external frequency would stop internal connectivity ?

Finally I lost my patience (particularly after being on the phone for 90 minutes and then being cut off), another support person told me they would send an engineer, I feel quite sorry for any engineer at this point, if it's working then there's nothing he can do, if it's not then he needs a power cycle to restore service, sometimes I'm resetting the hub 6 times a day, normally 2-3 is common.

Another tech guy quite sarcastically asked how I have 8 devices connected to my hub, I've used a passive switch on one ethernet port to let my daughter plug multiple devices in, the hub is an old 100MB one but has been there for something like 7 years without issue, it also helps throttle my daughters bandwidth as it prevents her running more than 100MB, he was quite arrogant in telling me the issue was the bandwidth of the hub and he would alter it to resolve the issue - again, I'm not sure what he means by this but 15 minutes after he made this statement the hub dropped connection again.

All through these long conversations they made it clear if I wanted a superhub 3 I would have to pay for an upgrade (as there's no fault with the superhub 2), it's quite frustrating when you go around in circles and no one is listening, in all I had to restart my hub 3 times while talking to tech people, all of them said there's no issue with the hub, it must be something I'm doing or something on my network causing the problem.

After a chat with customer relations asking them to cancel my account (there's no point having it if it doesn't work), they offered me an upgrade to the Superhub 3 - this is a slightly different hub to the old one and I found some issues installing it, hopefully the notes here will help.

Initial setting up is not too difficult, the automated number (and the paperwork) said to leave the hub for 3 minutes then power cycle - I noticed it took about 10-15 minutes until the front light went white (with the other lights out), then I power cycled.

The hub then took about 40 minutes to upgrade itself and get itself on line, if you try and access it at this point through the web interface you will see messages that it's upgrading - I left it for an hour or so to let it upload etc.

I wanted to change my Admin password on the hub, it took me a couple of minutes to realise the default password is on a label underneath the hub, its a bit dark in my room so I didn't see it until I popped a torch on - a quick change of the password and that was all sorted.

Wifi is a little different, not much, you can specify two wireless SSID (one for 2.4GHz and one for 5GHz), it insists on a complex password or phrase, I'm OK with this, far too many people have weak passwords - I set them up and the hub does a soft reset, you see the networks published in a minute or so, I have a 2.4GHz AP which has been running for donkeys years, I had the 2.4GHz network disabled in my old hub 2 and I disabled it in my hub 3, if it works then I don't see much point breaking it.

One ethernet port failed to come up - I noticed 3 of the rear ports were working OK, one wasn't (I entered a long loop of head scratching as I had several problems hit me at once - it wasn't my first check to see if I had lights, I had lost connection to my server - which uses Fixed IP, I also lost connection to my NAS box and my laptop for some strange reason refused to join the 5GHZ wireless).

Tackling these issues in order I thought I would give the hub a pin hole reset, just in case something stopped the 4th Ethernet connection from coming on line, I had already moved devices around and the issue was "hard", staying with the connection. Holding the reset button for about 40 seconds I noticed the port came "up" when the hub restarted, for some people they might think the hub was faulty - I certainly thought it was DOA but was taught a lesson to remember to eliminate the basics first.

Because the pin hole reset cleared the hub I just entered the settings I had put in before, it only took a couple of minutes, one problem down - a few more to go. I have a few devices using fixed IP, nothing major but with my old hub I set my DHCP starting IP at 120 (192.168.0.120), there's no real reason for this, it was a random number I picked, my server is 192.168.0.99, my NAS box 192.168.0.100 and I have a couple of other devices using fixed IP.

I've seen strange things happen when devices are assigned fixed IP and one fix I remember is to change them back to DHCP, then let the hub or whatever assign the IP using a reservation, I changed my server to DHCP, dropped the connection and let it assign a DHCP - I clicked on the hub DHCP page and refreshed the list, I could now see my server, I popped the mac address into the DCHP reservation list and set it for 192.168.0.99 - apply the setting and then drop the connection on my server - all good, I'm now on 192.168.0.99

My NAS box is an IOMEGA 200D running NAS4FREE, it's a great operating system, the NAS is solid and never needs resetting, it just runs. I popped a cable into it so I could talk to it (I couldn't see it from the hub or on the network), most likely because it's association is with the previous hub, I logged into it through the web browser and set the network to DHCP, then told it to restart.

I set the dHCP reservation for the NAS box Mac address and it's IP for 192.168.0.100 but for some reason I couldn't see it, after a bit of fumbling around I remembered I can plug a monitor into the back of the NAS box (and a USB keyboard), I popped my monitor in and saw the NAS4FREE menu, I selected option 2 (Network congiguration), I told it to use DHCP and almost as soon as I did I saw a message that it was on the right IP address.

At this point I've got the hub 3 on line with all 4 ethernet ports working, Wifi (2.4GHz is still through my old AP, 5GHz is through the hub 3) - I've one last (and strange nut to crack), for some reason my laptop wouldn't connect.

Looking in my linux error log I see a message that there's no authentication associated with the network manager, I also noticed I can't edit the networks (they are greyed out), a quick trip on the web and I delete %conf.xml which is in ~/.gconf/desktop

 I suspect I created an issue by calling my new wireless network the same as my old one, the linux keyring will have associated secrets for the network SSID and passwords (plus some other info like UUID etc.), as soon as I cleared this file I could edit the networks and got straight on line.

All in all the hub 3 looks much better, web pages are quicker and things seem to zip along much better, it was a bit of an ordeal having these issues and in hindsight the easy solution would have been to set my server (and any other devices) to DHCP before swapping the hub out, then everything would have connected and I could have assigned fixed IP from the hub, the show stopper was the 4th ethernet connection not working out of the box.

Only time will tell if this fixes all my issues, or not.