BT HH6 with no DMZ - and BQM is working

This has been working for a couple of years, WITH the DMZ pointing to my central heating wireless relay. But I've had a lot of broadband issues over the last week or two, and on investigating, there seemed to be a massive amount of traffic in the HH log going to that address - 60-odd pages in an hour or two. So I switched off the DMZ.
To my surprise, a day later, the BQM is still showing activity, when I expected to see a red wall.
The HH6 got a firmware update in February, but I don't think an ICMP request option has been added.
What am I missing?

Either they added ICMP Ping responses or you have found a bug where DMZ doesn't disable correctly.

None of the BT Home hubs/smart hubs have ever responded directly to ICMP Pings (only the BT Business Hubs can do so) so it would be an odd decision for them to randomly update the firmware of a few generations old device to add that single feature. Though that's not impossible.

My 1st guess would be it's a bug related to DMZ not disabling properly and a factory reset should hopefully fix it.

There's a couple troubleshooting steps you could take to find out what's happening.
You could try taking the central heating wireless relay offline to see if the pings stop responding.
You could factory reset the HH6.
You could wait for others with a HH6 to post their own experience.

Edit: didn't notice this post was from so many weeks ago.

Edited by j0hn83 (Mon 17-Apr-23 13:00:36)

Thanks for replying.
I'd been away for a few days, and the BQM graph was 100% red. So I re-enabled the DMZ for a few minutes then disabled it. The BQM is working perfectly again, and that's been about 24 hours now. So it is certainy not behaving as you'd expect, but its behaviour is ideal for my purpose.
I'll try disconnecting the CH relay and see if that affects things.

AB

j0hn83 - I tried your suggestion - disconnected the CH relay - and sure enough, the graph was flooded with red...
Then I put it back on, and the graph returned to normal.
So it does look as though the HomeHub 6 has a bug that allows it to respond to pings if the DMZ has been switched on, then off.
My feeling is that the behaviour can't be relied on, although I can't honestly say if it has stopped responding other than after the router has been rebooted (which is what happened while I was away last week).
Thanks,
AB

Update.
AS stated, it looks like the HH6 continues to allow a ping response from an address that was previously open as a DMZ, after the DMZ is switched off. It seems to remain like that until the next reset or reboot of the HH6.

The new info is that it also appears to deal differently with different ping sources.
I have 2 DDNS addresses, one from my web host and another from a DDNS provider. I have a BQM set up for each. (Interesting that the are usually similar but far from identical.) For a few days, the web host BQM was showing all packets dropped, while the DDNS one was working correctly.
After switching the CMZ on for a few minutes, both are working normally.
No reset or reboot of the HH6.

In reply to a post by ACC_B:

Update.
AS stated, it looks like the HH6 continues to allow a ping response from an address that was previously open as a DMZ, after the DMZ is switched off. It seems to remain like that until the next reset or reboot of the HH6.

The new info is that it also appears to deal differently with different ping sources.
I have 2 DDNS addresses, one from my web host and another from a DDNS provider. I have a BQM set up for each. (Interesting that the are usually similar but far from identical.) For a few days, the web host BQM was showing all packets dropped, while the DDNS one was working correctly.
After switching the CMZ on for a few minutes, both are working normally.
No reset or reboot of the HH6.

I'm not sure if thee could be a timing delay because of DDNS needing updating - I can't say how often this is checked as it's done inside the Firebrick.. but it could explain possibly..