“My Netgear Extender Won’t Work with My Xfinity Router Anymore!”

Updates near the ends of the post.

I was tinkering in the Router settings of my Xfinity router, looking at the things that could be done. I do admit that I changed some settings (mainly the ones that release the DHCP every day instead of every week).

All this tinkering has somehow bricked my Wi-Fi extender, Netgear WN3000RPv3

• It can connect to my main router (Xfinity), but Xfinity is no longer passing the data to it.
• It can be pinged.
• When I connect to it, I can ping other sites.
• It loads my Bing splash page and the list of news articles, but not the actual articles when I click them. Maybe a cache issue there?
• The issue is actually with my personal laptop, the Lenovo ThinkPad. Other devices can use it as intended. Good to narrow it down that way.
• The LED indicating connectivity to the device is amber. The LED indicating connectivity to the Router is green.

What did I do before contacting Comcast?

I reset the extender back to factory settings.
I power cycled both devices.
I did ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew, and felt like Cardcaptor Sakura.
I reset my machine.
ARP Flush (Thank you, Ren Beckford, for the suggestion!)

When we narrowed it down to my device, Comcast understandable wiped their hands of the problem.

On March 2nd, 2020

I had to enable a rule in my Firewall;

The Domain version was not active. My guess is my computer registers the Extender as another domain connected in the same network.

On April 16th, 2020

After finding an old laptop and attempting to connect it to the hotspot, it said ‘Nope. Not today. Not doing it.’ and kicked off everybody, including my main machine as well.

That machine is a 2010-esque HP laptop.
It’s been disconnected from hotspots.
I’m poking through firewall rules yet again.

On May 1st, 2020

It works again, though I haven’t tried to connect that dinosaur of a laptop back. No real need for it, I predict it’s simply too outdated. I could find some more wireless card drivers, but I have other, newer computers to work with.

Originally published at https://www.runtcpip.com on March 2, 2020.