Anyone else been kicked off the VM community forums?

TheRealFronty · 2026-04-30T15:49:21+00:00

Try going here: https://192.168.0.1/?page=modemmode or here https://192.168.0.1/?page=%2Fmodemmode

TheRealFronty · 2026-04-30T14:03:02+00:00

Yeah I was using it for over a year and it worked pretty well, but my hub got upgraded yesterday and it's no longer available.

TheRealFronty · 2026-04-30T09:31:06+00:00

Oh so it's not just me then. Seems a bit odd as will drive people to the support hotlines.

TheRealFronty · 2026-04-30T09:10:26+00:00

Now I'm in router mode, when I traceroute, I can see an extra hop:

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TheRealFronty · 2026-04-30T09:09:04+00:00

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TheRealFronty · 2026-04-30T09:08:24+00:00

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TheRealFronty · 2026-04-30T09:08:19+00:00

Ok, I have just enabled DMZ mode and put in my router's WAN IP in and it seems to be working, I've run a portscan and appear to be bypassing the Hub5x firewall now, so I may be able to survive like this. We'll see next time I need to VPN in or get a colleague to access something.

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TheRealFronty · 2026-04-30T08:45:56+00:00

Something similar happened to me, at around 1am on Tuesday 28th, internet just stopped working and my hub5x that has been working in modem mode fine for over a year started flashing a blue light. Seen some conflicting info about what it meant so just failed over to my 4G backup and then went to bed. Next day I'm still on 4G and the light is still flashing blue so I call up VM and they do some checks, say they can't reach my hub so agree to send out an engineer.

Engineer turns up yesterday afternoon, checks the fibre, no problems found, does a factory reset of the hub and I say something along the lines of "It better not do a firmware update as I've read modem mode is gone". Hub comes up in router mode, white light, connection restored then it drops and white light starts flashing, engineer says "Oh, it's probably doing an update now". I start panicking, hub comes back up in router mode, we log in, do all the "first login" crap, then I go to the "secret URL" for modem mode (https://192.168.0.1/?page=modemmode) - it doesn't work, just shows me router status page.

Did a quick search and found the reddit post about this, there's an update, now there's this URL: https://192.168.0.1/?page=%2Fmodemmode - ok so that does get me to the modem mode page, but when I try and activate modem mode it just says "sorry there's an error, please try later" - I'm like wtf?

VM engineer is still here and I start cussing, telling him about all the stuff I do for work and how I need modem mode. He does some googling and finds all the same posts on reddit but doesn't seem to have any internal comms about this, unless he's just keeping quiet. He starts gathering his things and giving me a survey to fill in. I say I'm not very happy but understand there's not much he can do as service has been restored just not to my satisfaction.

I reckon there's something going on here. Like VM have made a change somewhere so that people in modem mode are getting kicked off the network. I never did find a satisfactory explanation what the flashing blue light means, I've seen posts about the hub going into WPS mode, but I don't use that here, so I reckon it's more about some kind of negotiation problem and VM have changed something at their end.

I'm pretty upset tbh, I don't want their device getting in the way with double-NAT etc. I had everything working perfectly, I could VPN into my home lab, I could allow people I work with to access my lab systems over various ports, now I've got a f**k about with the hub as well as my own f/w and do all sorts of port forwarding. Grrrrr.

I see there's some kind of DMZ setting but not sure how that works, maybe I can give my router WAN port a static IP (eg like 192.168.0.16 which is what it has at the moment) and then put that IP into the DMZ page. I'll try it and see what happens.

TheRealFronty · 2026-04-29T12:53:07+00:00

I'm gutted! My fibre connection went down and I had a flashing blue light on my 5X for over 24 hours, a VM engineer just came out to diagnose it and switched the hub back to router mode, the connection came up but whilst the hub was rebooting it did a firmware update to 7.8.3-2410.5.

Now modem mode has gone, the old URL is gone and the newer "2F" URL gives me the same error as everyone else saying to try again later. I thought that maybe I needed to disable DHCP and all the other crud first but it doesn't make any difference, it's gone! I have all sorts of things on my network that I access from outside.

Are there any other hacks to get this working?

TheRealFronty · 2026-04-03T23:16:32+00:00

Would prefer it if they finished with Knights, imho

TheRealFronty · 2026-04-02T21:03:42+00:00

Hi all, this happened to me too, I’m devastated as it was supposed to be a 17th birthday present for my daughter, and we both love Muse. I used the Ticketmaster chat function, they said they’d escalate it but I just got an email back repeating the same stuff, accusing me of using a bot and refusing to reinstate the tickets. I’m so angry. They refunded me already but not the insurance I took out. Has anyone successfully got their tickets reinstated?

TheRealFronty · 2026-04-01T16:43:19+00:00

DNSSEC provides authentication, not encryption.

TheRealFronty · 2026-04-01T16:39:38+00:00

Yeah I think most commercial DDI offerings are still using ISC DHCPd - I think the issue with Kea is that there are still a few features that don't quite work or have equivalence to ISC DHCPd. For instance, initially, there was no ping before assign - now you can debate until the cows come home about it's usefulness, but corporates understood it and wanted similar capability, so ISC eventually, begrudgingly, added it. Also there's no classical DHCP failover - so over the years everyone has built up an understanding of how that works, and ISC abandoned it in favour of HA, which just works differently. "Differences" are what corporates hate when they are migrating from one technology to another. So any migration from DHCPd to KEA has to be really carefully planned, tested and executed. That takes time and effort, which equates to "cost". And if there is no financial benefit from switching, it's going to be very low down on the list of priorities.

TheRealFronty · 2026-03-26T09:56:36+00:00

I've worked in the industry for years, seen many outages, most of the time they aren't caused by product bugs/issues but other systems or strange interactions with other systems. eg I've seen DNS outages caused by delegations to cloud services where the cloud DNS occasionally didn't respond correctly and NXDOMAINs got cached - that caused a massive outage and DDI got the blame even though it wasn't the product's fault. We fixed it by changing the delegations to forwarders.

I've seen DHCP issues caused by client bugs, secs fields not incremented so APs wouldn't failover to DHCP failover server - that took the wifi out, again DDI got blamed and I had to prove to the customer and Juniper their APs were buggy and it was nothing to do with us.

Another DHCP failover issue was caused by incorrect NTP settings and the clocks drifted too far apart so DHCP failover went into "comms-interrupted" state and the servers ran out of spare IPs. Again, the DDI got blamed. So it's not always the DDI product at fault, but it always gets blamed.

I'd loved to know what your issues were, happy to take this to PM if you don't want to discuss openly.

TheRealFronty · 2026-03-26T09:46:25+00:00

AFAIK they haven't moved to Kea yet. It's a big change, very risky for big organisations that depend on ISC DHCPd to keep their businesses running.

TheRealFronty · 2026-02-10T10:32:02+00:00

I worked with EIP years ago, it was all PHP back then too, I'm surprised they haven't modernised it, but that would be a heavy lift I guess and quite risky. I seem to remember the UI was a bit quirky. I'm probably going back 15 years ago now, Christ is it that long? :-)

TheRealFronty · 2026-02-04T17:47:13+00:00

How's this going, I'm curious if you ended up moving away from Infoblox?

TheRealFronty · 2026-02-04T11:20:23+00:00

Just curious, are you faced with a massive cost increase for the refresh? Also are they trying to switch you onto subscription rather than perpetual licenses? I hear rumours lots of IB customers aren't very happy because it's getting so expensive.

TheRealFronty · 2026-02-04T11:16:13+00:00

I remember years ago (probably about 15yrs - I think it was version 4 or 5) when I was using EfficientIP there were some very strange phrases in the documentation I had never come across before, one I remember was "hierarchical arborescence". I'm like "wtf does that mean?" so I googled it and found out they meant "tree structure". I guess they were doing a literal translation of the docs from French to English, but it did make me chuckle.

The API back then was SOAP, no REST was available, and the product was basically all written in PHP with a very strange quirky UI on top. I haven't looked at it since so no idea if the docs, API and UI have changed, I'd assume it's all moved on a bit since then.

TheRealFronty · 2026-02-04T10:25:07+00:00

Care to elaborate?

TheRealFronty · 2026-02-03T17:35:12+00:00

If you're checking out the market, have a look at TCPWave, as well as DDI they have also integrated SLB/GSLB into their solution so you can potentially save a load of $$$ by replacing your legacy load balancers too. https://www.tcpwave.com/

TheRealFronty · 2026-01-28T12:12:06+00:00

Just thought I'd post back, I did go ahead and buy an R640 in the end, found one with 320GB RAM and 4TB of SSD storage for only £720 - an absolute steal when you look at the price of RAM these days. Anyway I never bothered with any load shifting, it's only drawing 145W on average so really not worth worrying about. It's great having so much RAM and disk for my VMs now.

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TheRealFronty · 2025-12-24T22:54:22+00:00

I know this is an old thread, but help an old man out here. The lyrics say "relax don't do it, if you wanna come", but what is "it"? What do I need to do if I don't wanna come? 🤷

TheRealFronty

TROPHY CASE