Ever since I got the BE700 Pro in July I have had an issue with it periodically dropping two particular wired clients from its client list, causing them to disconnect from the network and the client disappears from the DHCP list. If I unplug the Ethernet cable from the affected client and then reconnect it, this restores the connection - for a while. One of the clients is a Windows PC, the other is a Synology DS925+ NAS. As best as I can tell, no other wired clients are affected. I can sometimes go a day or more without an issue, then it will happen multiple times within an hour or two.

I contacted TP-Link support about this a couple of months ago and they gave me an unreleased firmware (from July) that reduced the frequency of the problem, but did not eliminate it. After a while, support responses just led me in circles and I gave up. Each device is connected to the router via a TP-Link gigabit switch, but other devices on those switches do not disconnect. I have since run new Cat6 wiring, new patch cords and even tried new switches - nothing helped. I did not have this problem with my previous router.

I do have pihole running on a Raspberry Pi Zero2W, connected by Ethernet to the router, and another instance on the NAS. At present, I have the router using the Pi as the primary DNS and Quad9 as secondary. In an attempt to see if pihole was the culprit I changed the NAS to use external DNS servers (Cloudflare and Quad9) so it would not be using pihole at all. The PC is using the router for DNS. I have convinced myself that pihole is not responsible for the issue.

There does not seem to be any specific activity tied to the connection drop. The heaviest usage is when one of my PCs does a daily backup to the NAS, but it rarely disconnects during this process.

Other than this extremely aggravating issue, the BE700 Pro is performing well, which is why this is so frustrating. What else can I do?