Netgear routers and time keeping....

Straight_Man

I had this little problem with the Netgear RP614 not keeping time. Called, asked tech suport if the thing had a CMOS or clock battery in it.... Nope, it has a nice little NNTP function preconfigured in it, needs port 123 open-- well guess who shut UDP port 123 in config, and router happily blocked itself (I told it ALL IPs for the port based service blocks I set up) from getting time ticks. No wonder the silly thing was happily restting time to 00:00:00 and no date and deciding every 48 hours it would lock until power cycled to get new lease, it was pulling a 1 day lease... :urk:

So, if you have a baby router not keeping time, UNBLOCK UDP port 123. THEN see if it also happily serves time ticks to LAN if your local boxes are not great time keepers.... Side benefit for me, and what alerted me to problem, is that the router log emails kept having dates of 1900 or 2036-- depending on where in the email header source you looked....

Good for a relieved laugh at myself....

mmonnin

Hmm we have a Netgear at the apartment and it hasnt had a problem at all.

Straight_Man

You did not do what I did.... I am using this router as a firewall. EVERYthing that does not NEED to be open, port-wise, is closed. The Router emails me logs of blocked port violations-- to my domain at http://www.johndanielonii.com/ , which is out in CA on a hosting provider, on a non-Windows server. Thus, firewall as IDS detect, in a partial way. The XP box's firewall logs also work to help isolate such things. Linux also has this, so the Linux box also tracks access. Basicly, using router to provide layer of protection and at least ID what is attempted, is one reason I bought this model.

John.