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I'm trying to understand the source of an event that is causing my Verizon provided Actiontec MI424WR gateway to hang. With the understanding, I would like to takes steps to ensure it does not happen in the future.

I experience the hang multiple times a day (a dozen or so), and they last from 20 or 30 seconds to one or two minutes. Then things go back to normal.

The hang is experienced as "internet down" and unresponsive gateway. Web pages fail to load; and ping'ing the gateway results in timeouts.

The hang occurs on both the Ethernet interfaces (desktop computers hard wired) and the Wifi interface (iPads and other devices connected wirelessly).

Grepping the gateway's logs, I've correlated the event to this log entry:

TIME                      EVENT           EVENT TYPE    DETAILS
Jan 30 11:41:40 2014      System Log      LAN Coax      LAN Coax Link Low Rate <TX 168Mbps/RX 164Mbps>
Jan 30 11:41:40 2014      System Log      WAN Coax      WAN Coax Link Rate <TX 227Mbps/RX 240Mbps>

The full display from the event log is shown below and the event was logged at 11:41 AM. I've got a script running that tests for the hang (its that frequent), and the event actually occurred between 11:39 - 11:40 AM (it was just logged 11:41).

enter image description here

When I move to Traffic Monitoring page as shown below, I see that all the traffic monitor statistics have been reset. For example, the Time Span (uptime?) shown below is 24 minutes, and that is the time elapsed between now (12:05 PM) and the event (11:40 AM).

enter image description here


EDIT: from the System Monitoring -> Router Status page, the following applies to the gateway:

Firmware Version:   40.21.10.2
Model Name:         MI424WR-GEN3I
Hardware Version:   I
Serial Number:      CSJI2031010495

According to the Advanced -> Firmware Upgrade page, the gateway does not have any upgrades available:

enter image description here


What is causing this event?

What can I do so I don't experience the frequent loss of service?

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    You can't do anything. I experienced a similar problem. I had to get my provider out and they discovered it was an engress problem. Basically the line was so noisy the router had no idea what to do.
    – Ramhound
    Jan 30, 2014 at 20:20

1 Answer 1

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Anytime you find a bug in an embedded hardware product, make sure you're running the latest firmware, in case that bug has already been found and fixed by the manufacturer. When asking others for help, always say exactly which hardware revision you have and which firmware version number you're running (don't say "the latest", because in my experience, people who say "the latest" without saying the actual version number are wrong more than half of the time).

So make sure you're running the latest firmware on your MI424WR. If your device has a built-in feature where it checks for, and downloads, the latest firmware it can find, that's a good thing to run. However, sometimes those features don't work and it's worth looking online to find independent confirmation that the latest version your auto-updater found really is the latest version available.

Note that there have been many different hardware revisions of the MI424WR over the years, so make sure you find the latest version for your particular revision.

http://support.actiontec.com/doc_files/Current_Firmware_Versions.pdf

According to that PDF, as of 2014-01-17, here are the Actiontec- and Verizon-approved firmware versions for each hardware revision:

MI424WN A, C, and D: 4.0.16.1.56.0.10.14.4
MI424WN E and F: 20.19.8
MI424WN G: 30.18.5
MI424WN I: 40.21.10.2

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  • OK, thanks. So it appears the gateway is at the expected firmware revision level. I suspect this boils down to Verizon junk. I'd love to use my own hardware, but Verizon won't support it. So instead, I get chronic harassment from their hardware; and then I get tortured by their tech support. I must be a masochist.
    – jww
    Jan 30, 2014 at 19:29

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