ZyWall 2 Router - Kills Internet Every Couple of Days

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I have a Zyxel ZyWall 2 VPN router at home to connect to my ZyWall 70 at work. It’s worked fine for years, but in the last few months, I’ll come home and no internet.

I originally thought it was the cable modem, since every time I would reboot the modem, everything would work again. Called my ISP and he rebooted the ZyWall and everything worked, so he’s saying it’s the ZyWall.

Now, every couple of days, I have to reboot the ZyWall to get internet. We had another BRAND NEW ZyWall 2 at work that I took home to try in case it was a hardware issue. The new one has the exact same problem. BTW, latest firmware on both units.

Anyone have any idea on what is going on here? I’m thinking it’s something the cable company has changed in their modem firmware or something, but how can I trace this? It’s driving me crazy!

2

can you reload an older firmware?

3

Since it happens every few days and doesn’t seem to correlate with anything else, could it have something to do with the router renewing its license with the ISP?

I don’t really understand this stuff, but apparently, when you have a dynamically assigned IP address on a router that is always connected, depending on ISP policies, it will get a new “license” every so often - which AFAIK just means that it asks for a new IP address.

That shouldn’t cause any problems for virtually any router, but maybe there is a bug in the firmware as drachillix may have been suggesting.

4

I doubt it’s the ZyWall, more likely the ISP - I bet they did something other than just reboot the ZyWall. But if you can borrow a router of a different brand and it still happens, that’d prove it.

5

Thanks for the replies! I contacted Zyxel (I wrote here as well since my model is a “legacy” product - I wasn’t sure I’d get a reply) and they told me it might be something dealing with “gratuitous ARP requests”. He gave me a command to type at the firewall console to try, so we’ll see if that resolves the issue.

drachillix: This firmware has been on the unit for a long time now with no issue.

dzero: I am not using any of the license functions of the firewall (ie Content Block, AV, etc.)

Askance: I was there and saw what he did - all he did was reboot the ZyWall and the internet was up.

I’ll let everyone know if this issue resolves in the next couple of days…

6

First suggestion failed, so I’ve tried his 2nd suggestion - place a switch between the cable modem and the ZyWall. Will update if this works/fails…