I've found that, after upgrading to 3.3.5.2 on my Vigor 2820Vn, the Wireless LAN appears to turn itself off over night? I wake up each morning to a couple of WLAN clients and an AP700 acting as a bridge all thinking they are connecting, but no data transfer. The Vigor exhibits all the signs of the WLAN being disabled (a scan for APs returns no results and there are no stations in the list). I have to reboot the router, or turn WLAN off, then on again to "wake it up"!?!?!

When it is "working", WLAN performance is terrible also. I've tried modifying the settings as suggested in this forum, but nothing seems to make much difference. It was all working perfectly until I upgraded to 3.3.5.2, so I've downgraded to 3.3.4 and will monitor WLAN stability and performance.

All, I've found a little bit of very useful (although extremely irritating) advice that's hidden away in the release notes and upgrade instructions for all Draytek firmware releases, but we all choose to ignore it. Do not upgrade using your existing configuration, or restore a configuration from a previous version when upgrading the firmware. In order to ensure there are no issues following a firmware upgrade, you must manually re-configure the router"

I know what you're all thinking... The same as I was probably! You don't have to do this with any other vendor's equipment, why can't Draytek construct their firmware upgrade process to port the configuration properly?!?!

Well, I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that the advice seems to work, for me at least. I was having precisely the same problems with Wireless, which started with 3.3.1, but were a lot worse in 3.3.5.2, then I realised I hadn't re-configured the router from scratch since before 3.3.1! I tried retrograding the firmware back to a 3.3.1 version, but the problems persisted. It was only when I upgraded with the "RST" version of the 3.3.5.2 that everything has now stabilised with wireless behaving (pretty much) how I would expect.

This piece of advice was provided by the Draytek email support. At first I was very annoyed, believing it to be the usual blanket fix for all technology problems ("switch it off and switch it back on" kind of thing), then I thought a little more about how each of these successive upgrades has brought significant functionality changes, which must've changed the layout of the configuration file in some way, so starting from a fresh configuration made a lot of sense. I did it and haven't had a recurrence of the problems since! :mrgreen:

The thought of configuring my 2820 from scratch frightens the **** out of me! :shock:

That alone would put me off upgrading to the later firmware release...

Surely if DrayTek recommend we reset the router to factory default they should at least ensure it is compatible with their own backup files FFS?? :evil:

I mean if I have no alternative but to reconfiigure from scratch that would push me into replacing my 2008 vintage 2820 and purchase something that has the benefit of a further 3 years development built into it from the start...

-=Glyn=-

Yes Glyn, I absolutely agree. Believe me, I'm not defending this approach, just confirming that it does seem to resolve the issue and allow you to take advantage of the most recent firmware.

I have a fairly complex configuration including multiple L2L VPNs, port forwarding, DMZ hosts, WLAN, Firewall controls, VLANs, etc. so I was also not too happy at the thought of doing this. I found the only way to proceed was to go through the following process :-

1) Make sure you know all the masked parts of the configuration (ISP password, WPA / WPA2 PSKs, IKE keys, etc.) and make a note of them.
2) Go through each configuration screen and take a screenshot of them all, pasting the outputs into a single document.
3) Take a backup of the configuration.
4) Upgrade to the latest firmware using the RST file. This will set the LAN IP back to defaults, so you need to ensure you are able to connect to this default network.
5) Step through your screenshots document and re-apply the configuration, referring to your passwords / etc. notes where needed.
6) Backup the configuration.
7) Destroy any written notes including passwords securely if you're concerned about them being compromised.

To be honest, you'll be grateful for having gone through this process in the future if your Draytek router ever dies and you have to either purchase a newer model, or a different make of router (so your backup configuration is uesless). You'll have a manual reference for your configuration that is priceless in recovering from that situation! So, there is a silver lining, although it doesn't quite remove the slightly bitter taste from your mouth from needing to go through the process in the first place!

Good luck! :mrgreen:

Thanks for the tips Neal...I done a similar thing a few years ago with my computer BIOS as my setup here is complex and it was worth its weight in gold when my Asus motherboard failed. I had bought two so was able to drop in the spare and swap over the Dual Xeons, RAID HDD setup, etc. and be back up & running in no time.

I thought there was a lot of info in there but that pales into insignificance compared to my router settings!

I am not going to do anything right now as it all seems to be working on 3.3.3_232201 and do not want to upset the balance as I have BT Infinity coming on Monday so will need to setup WAN2 and all that goes along with it...don't want to complicate the issue at this stage!

I will be posting another thread looking for hints, tips, etc. on setting up for BT Infinity shortly!

Have a great weekend...

Thanks & kind regards,
-=Glyn=-

GlynH wrote: The thought of configuring my 2820 from scratch frightens the **** out of me! :shock:

That alone would put me off upgrading to the later firmware release...

Surely if DrayTek recommend we reset the router to factory default they should at least ensure it is compatible with their own backup files FFS?? :evil:

I mean if I have no alternative but to reconfiigure from scratch that would push me into replacing my 2008 vintage 2820 and purchase something that has the benefit of a further 3 years development built into it from the start...

-=Glyn=-

Amen!

It would help matters considerably if Draytek would implement a sensible backup/restore schema, such as creating a VARIABLE=VALUE txt file - heck even something done with XML would make sense rather than the gibberish that just looks like a binary dump of the config memory. Anyway, as I mentioned before, we no longer use Draytek kit and some 35 26xx and 28xx routers have now been replaced with something else during a WAN upgrade - we could have used Draytek, but we didn't.