Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2019 7:30 Post subject: Netgear R7000P power light stays amber
Hi, just installed dd-wrt.v24-K3_AC_ARM_R7000P.bin on my new Netgear R7000P-100NAS. Everything is working great, but I notice that the power light remains bright amber after completing boot, and internet light (next to it) is amber too, but sightly less "amber" - maybe it's actually white, but the amber is bleeding over from the one next to it? Not sure. Anyway, just wondering why the power light would remain amber like this, when everything is otherwise working. Is this something anybody has seen? When I search for this, all I seem to find is stuff about the router being bricked, but that's definitely not the case here. Is there some bug in the firmware, or is this just normal behavior, or is it telling me there's something wrong somewhere...?
I followed instructions by installing the firmware, then doing factory reset, then did my own (somewhat minimal) settings, e.g. renaming the SSID to what they were before.
I have gotten as far as trying some of the earlier builds from http://ddwrt-kong.clonevince.fr/ and found that the ones earlier like 36440 made the id correct (and the amber power light now white). Then just to see if the changes they talked about being committed were really there, I tried the latest one, 37985, and that works too.
So it looks like I just happened to hit one of the builds that didn't have the fix. Ugh. I can't remember when I got that from, but I think it maybe was this site?
However, I find that 5G doesn't work. That's something that the other thread I referenced above also talks about, I guess it maybe wasn't working before either but I just didn't notice. So now I need to figure that out... I tried making channel set to 140 instead of Auto, but no luck yet. If you have any clues on that one I'd appreciate it...
Also, how exactly do I erase nvram? What does that do? Does nvram mean "non-volatile ram"? If so then I can see why that might be good, but not sure if it's the issue. The only thing I'm aware of now is the 5G issue. Status has no successful packets, only errors, and when I try connecting to the 5G network from my phone, it fails.
Aha! Ok, I discovered the 'commands' tab (under Administration), and did the 'erase nvram && reboot' magic incantation mentioned in that other thread, and now 5G seems to be working! Yay!
Thanks for the help, and apologies for posting this prematurely, but maybe it'll be of some help to someone else who jumped in like me and is having the same issue.
great news. i don't tend to update much if there is no specific reason (security, new feature, etc), if the router is stable and the features i use are working fine i just keep it as it is, so making a mistake or bricking a router is less likely to happen.
I switched to dd-wrt because I noticed that all of my long-running ssh shells to my remote servers had been disconnected sometime overnight (just got the new router yesterday). Poking around I quickly found lots of people talking about this issue, and also how flakey the Netgear firmware seems to be. There were also passing mentions of dd-wrt, which I never heard of until a few hours ago. People say the hardware on the R7000P is solid, so I decided to try different firmware to see if it's more stable. Fingers crossed...
I switched to dd-wrt because I noticed that all of my long-running ssh shells to my remote servers had been disconnected sometime overnight (just got the new router yesterday). Poking around I quickly found lots of people talking about this issue, and also how flakey the Netgear firmware seems to be. There were also passing mentions of dd-wrt, which I never heard of until a few hours ago. People say the hardware on the R7000P is solid, so I decided to try different firmware to see if it's more stable. Fingers crossed...
report back with your findings then, it will help someone for sure.
Just wanted to post an update as requested - the router has been working non-stop, rock solid, no dropped connections. I'm very happy.
As an aside, I also tried installing dd-wrt on the old router (Netgear WNDR3400 v1) following the instructions, mostly - I didn't bother doing any of the voodoo stuff like resetting three times or whatever that was. I just installed the min one first (dd-wrt.v24-30880_NEWD-2_K2.6_mini-WNDR3400.chk), and then the max one over that (dd-wrt.v24-36247_NEWD-2_K3.x_mega-nv64k.bin). Worked fine, so now I have a backup router which works exactly the same as my new one - again, I'm thrilled. Very very cool. Thanks to all the dd-wrt folks who do this stuff and keep it up and running, I wish I'd been more aware of all this years ago. Good job.