Can't remote connect to router anymore.

I setup my Netgear DGN2200 router with remote management together with dyndns to update the ip and connected several network cameras to view what's going on while away on holiday.
About 10 days ago while viewing one of the cameras it suddenly became unavailable. I logged in remotely to my router which seemed to be fine and that connection also suddenly became unavailable but I was able to view one of the cameras for a few hours. Then the connection to everything has been completely lost. I don't know what's happened and why the connection has dropped. I haven't received an update from dydndns since it happened. I'm away on vacation and won't be able to check my router back home for another 2 weeks. I'm assuming that the router must have crashed and needs to be reset. Any ideas why this happened and what can be done without physically resetting the router?

Do you have a paid DynDNS Account?
Free accounts have been removed.

Yes I'm using a paid account.

Sounds like either the ADSL connection has gone down or the router firmware itself has crashed.

Your ISP should be able to tell you if the circuit is in sync but a firmware crash requires a physical reboot, nothing you can do on a consumer grade router when this happens.

Any trusted friend or neighbour who could go in and restart it for you?

Thanks for the reply.
I'm just hoping there will be some kind of temporary power cut in my area that will allow the router to switch itself off and on.
To avoid this problem in the future I was thinking of connecting the router's power adapter to a timer to automatically switch it off and restart it once a day.
This crash suddenly happened when I was watching my ip cameras via an rtsp stream.
You mention that this happens on a consumer grade router. What kind of router do I need to avoid this kind of problem?

In reply to a post by bethere:

What kind of router do I need to avoid this kind of problem?

Draytek would be the best tool for the job - comes with lots of DDNS options. The other suggestion is get a static IP from your ISP.

If the firmware has crashed DDNS or fixed IP won't do much good.

Draytek routers do have a good rep for reliability but don't as far as I know come with out of band remote management capability to allow a remote reboot.

If the router had remote management you'd need a separate connection to connect to it but the routers that have this aren't really designed for a domestic install.

Edited by techguy (Sat 02-Aug-14 20:13:58)

But if he got a Draytek then it wouldn't hang in the first place. Also, half the time with the domestic routers the router is fine it is just the DDNS service which has thrown a wobbler, a static IP gets round that issue but obviously it may come at a cost. The other option is some IP cameras have a DDNS service so you could set that up also for DDNS and then if the router stops updating the DDNS properly then the IP camera will do so in its absence. It very much depends. I would be surprised if the entire router has crashed, it has probably lost sync and got confused and won't resync, or like I say, the DDNS service has packed in.

In reply to a post by Pipexer:

But if he got a Draytek then it wouldn't hang in the first place.

It also might not work correctly, even after two and a half years of firmware updates!

This can happen to all manner of routers, including the extremely expensive carrier grade routers that ISPs use, the difference being the more expensive enterprise grade routers, and up, tend to come with features that either mitigate the damage (ie failover pairs with resilient connections, but that costs money, and requires two routers, and two or more connections) or reduces the likely hood of a crash in the first place (ie system resource monitoring, and low memory alerting). The out of band management features (that someone brought up elsewhere in this thread) also help in recovering from a failure, but out of band management requires a management connection (a separate data connection not reliant on the hardware being managed).

Someone else in this thread mentioned Draytek, and I have one of their routers, and am very happy with it, however, I very much doubt it would have prevented your issue. It sounds to me, like you have exhausted the running memory of the router, and caused it to crash. The RTSP connection you had to your cameras is a control connection, and the video data would have been sent over another protocol, I suspect something UDP based (but I could well be wrong) and UDP connection tracking is harder for a router to perform than TCP connection tracking, and so will have used more memory than the router would otherwise have used.

It is also worth considering the possibility your router has been hacked. I suspect this is less likely, but it is a possibility with remote management enabled (something that is always a risky proposition) especially if you are using an insecure protocol to access the remote management (http instead of the encrypted https) or you have used a relatively weak admin password. Using the default admin password and enabling remote management is asking for trouble. Consumer grade routers do not tend to come with much in the way of access accounting or tools to prevent brute force attacks.

Well I use Draytek with DDNS for some people and it seems stable, they only start crashing when you start using advanced features like VPN and custom routing etc (Not that I am excusing that, you understand, but the OP probably isn't going to be using those features).

In reply to a post by pmb00cs:

Someone else in this thread mentioned Draytek, and I have one of their routers, and am very happy with it, however, I very much doubt it would have prevented your issue. It sounds to me, like you have exhausted the running memory of the router, and caused it to crash. The RTSP connection you had to your cameras is a control connection, and the video data would have been sent over another protocol, I suspect something UDP based (but I could well be wrong) and UDP connection tracking is harder for a router to perform than TCP connection tracking, and so will have used more memory than the router would otherwise have used.

So you are saying a different router would also have exhausted the running memory in the same manner the Netgear one would? I don't think that is very likely.

Yes, I am.

Now it may have taken longer, or the memory exhaustion of this netgear may have been a long time coming. I do not know how long the netgear has been running, nor do have any experience of that model of netgear to offer a reasonable estimate of how long it will have taken to run out of memory.

What I can say is I have yet to come across a router that has perfect memory allocation and reclamation features, such that it is immune to memory exhaustion. They tend to have features that mitigate the damage such an event causes, and monitoring of their memory usage to alert their administrators to the risk, allowing steps to be taken to prevent issues.

If you have a router that takes longer to exhaust it's memory than it is ever likely to be on for then you would never see any memory exhaustion issues, and that, in my experience, applies to the design of every consumer, and soho, grade router out there.

I am also speculating that memory exhaustion is the cause of the crash. It just seems, in my llimited knowledge of this event, to be the most likely cause. It could also be caused by corruption of the running config, or a change to the connection parameters set by the ISP (ie the router is running fine, but currently unable to connect to the internet for one of many reasons), or a hardware failure, or a prolonged power outage at the OP's home, or one of any number of possible other causes, all of which would effect even the most expensive router, just the more expensive routers may be effected less often by some of them, or handle them better, or just differently.

The only answer is a remote reboot switch using telephone or mobile for home situations

http://www.amazon.co.uk/GSM-TIMER-SWITCH-CONTROLLER-...

http://www.technotrend.co.uk/pages/ss_products/phone...

This seems to be the cheapest solution as already proposed http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mercury-350-103-TMR-1-Timer-...