ZyWALL 1100 reboots automatically

Sulcus · October 2017

I've got a ZyWALL 1100 which reboots itself twice a week. Got in contact with Support two months ago, and they asked me to retrieve logs by putting an USB drive into the back of the device.

Because the firewall is installed at the other side of the world, I wasn't able to do that. But to my surprise I found that ZyXEL released a new firmware update a few days later. And in their release notes they've mentioned a bug fix for '#170400243 Fixed the device reboot accidentally issue'

After installing the firmware update I noticed some improvements, but the firewall is still rebooting itself. Although not as frequently as before.
Because of the way support has responded, e.g. send us logs in stead of admitting their is a bug in the firmware, I totally lost my trust in these firewalls. We've initially bought 2 to set it up in HA, but that didn't work from the start, and I gave up (I've been able to set it up with other brands like WatchGuard, so know what I'm doing).

Does anyone else have troubles with firewalls rebooting accidentally as well?

Johan · October 2017

I do suspect the firmware update could have been a coincidence. I have contact with a lot of customers with ZyXEL ZyWALLs & USGs using the 4.xx firmwares and have not heard of the issue.

This leads me to believe it is either something very unique with your configuration that causes a bug to appear. Possibly that it is a hardware fault.

Without logs it will be very difficult for anyone to find the issue. Have you got anyone at the remote site that could plug in a USB-memory/thumb drive?

What UTM-services have you got enabled? (Anti-Virus, Anti-Spam, Content Filter, AppPatrol and so on)

How is the load on CPU, memory & session?

Regarding Device-HA, did you follow this guide when you tried setting up Device-HA? http://kb.zyxel.com/KB/searchArticle!viewDetail.action?articleOid=012066&lang=EN

Have a nice day!