[Fork] Asuswrt-Merlin 374.43 LTS releases (Archive)

[john9527]

Holy shirt that worked Thanks!!

Thanks for letting me know that worked. I'll pick up a change so you won't need to add the router for the next release.

 

[punchsuckr]

Thanks for letting me know that worked. I'll pick up a change so you won't need to add the router for the next release.

Btw I noticed a language error on the config page that opens after a factory reset (yeah we still have those ), it says "back main page" in the top left box.

Also, will a change of default behavior for wps button to toggle wifi be against user friendliness? We do know wps shouldn't b left enabled cause of security issues...

 

[destructionj]

Hi, I will apologize in advance for the laziness of not reading 262 pages to find a answer. I downgraded a TM-AC1900 router back in 2014 and honestly i am a bit rusty at process that was involved. That being said i have been running Firmware:374.43_2-13E1j9527 for a couple years now and noticed that this fork is actively being updated. I am considering the current version and noticed that some revisions are not supported. I cant find a revision on this router. I figured it might be a good idea to ask a more knowledgeable source before blindly flashing. would anyone kindly give some thoughts on safe upgrading procedure.
Thanks

 

[jail4ceos2]

Hi I just updated to the latest Merlin and I now can't get a useful signal in my hard to reach place. On a much older Merlin FW I was able to add a few extra MW to get coverage there. You say in the description that this fork allows "Less of a lockdown on tweaking power levels". Does that mean I can adjust the output by a few more MW?

Also, there have been several disconnects of wireless clients since the new install. I did not do a full factory reset with the Asus restore tool.

Also, and this is a bigger more prickly question. I thrash this poor unit with heavy (wired) torrenting on a 60/16 connection with an average of 30GB/day. I also usually have 10-15 devices connected wired/2.4G/5G. After a while my downloads drop down to 20 or 15 in a perfectly flat line instead of 60. I don't think it's ISP traffic shaping as I can get it to come back up into the 50's by simply by restarting the N66U, while leaving the modem going. Someone fairly recently in this thread was suggested an new power supply to fix his unit's flakyness. (I had to get a new wall wart on day 1, 3 years ago, fresh out of the box!) Could this be a source of my problems, or is the old girl just not up to the task anymore? It wouldn't take much of a push to get me to fork out for a new AC68 if the general consensus here is I'm asking for more than a N66U can give.

 

[Santiago C]

Hi guys. I have been facing issues with the TUN interface in the last couple days. For some reason when the OpenVPN client either stops or restarts (ex, change in my IP address, wan restart) I get my syslog flooded with this messages:

kern.emerg kernel: unregister_netdevice: waiting for tun11 to become free. Usage count = 1

This happens when "openvpn --rmtun tun11" is invoked and the only thing that works is rebooting. I guess the interface is taken down in advance but something gets stuck and cannot be ever released.
Google finds similar messages but everything points at something fixed along 2.6.14 kernel, way older than the 2.6.36.4 currently used.

Any help would be extremely appreciated!

S
--

 

[ml70]

http://bit.ly/1YdgUcP 404 not found

Or what if bit.ly is down...please include the full link, too.

 

[john9527]

http://bit.ly/1YdgUcP 404 not found

Or what if bit.ly is down...please include the full link, too.

Not down.....works for me (I clicked on the link in your post). I use bit.ly to get some basic download stats since MS doesn't provide any....at least that I know of.

 

[punchsuckr]

Btw I noticed a language error on the config page that opens after a factory reset (yeah we still have those ), it says "back main page" in the top left box.

Also, will a change of default behavior for wps button to toggle wifi be against user friendliness? We do know wps shouldn't b left enabled cause of security issues...

and John, any reason the enable wireless scheduler is default on with all days checked? Doesn't it mean one more process running for no reason?

 

[john9527]

and John, any reason the enable wireless scheduler is default on with all days checked? Doesn't it mean one more process running for no reason?

Uhh...no, it's not (at least on the 68U). I'll have to fire up the N66 to see if it's different.

EDIT: OK....I was wrong.....it does default on. Will change the default to off for the next release.

 

[namtih]

Yesterday I've switched the firmware from merlin-380.58 to this fork. Everything went quite smooth without any big issues. And the AC56U is running fine. Big thanks John.
But I want to adress some points I've noticed:
1. Opening the web interface I've noticed some unused space in the upper part of the administration web interface and the missing "Status" register card, which shows the CPU und memory usage in the merlin firmware. Is this correct or is something broken?
Screenshot: https://pl.vc/1d0esm

2. First I had some issues to reconnect my USB harddrives formatted with NTFS via modified fstab. The reason was that this fork seems to use another NTFS driver by Paragon and the filesystem parameter has to be changed from "tntfs" to "ufsd".
So I've read the Paragon manual regarding available mount parameters and wanted to use the "discard" parameter to use the trim-feature for my SSD drive. But it's not mounting and is flagged as "invalid parameter".
Is the included Paragon driver too old and doesn't support the discard-parameter yet or isn't it supported by the kernel? Apart from that the 5TB UB drives are working fine.
Manual: http://download.paragon-software.com/doc/ntfs_hfs_linux_9_4_user_manual.pdf

3. I'm using a manually created hosts-file to block some malware- and ad-server. This hosts file has an filezise of about 14MB and was working fine with the merlin firmware.
With this fork I wasn't able to open any website as it seems to ran into an timeout. I also wasn't able to ping the website from my computer. Direct ping from the router was possible.
I'm now using an smaller version of the hosts-file with about 8MB size and it's working fine.
Is this an known limit with this fork or are there any options to use it like the merlin firmware?

4. There seems also another behavior of the spin up feature of the harddrives. With merlin firmware as I opened a shared directory via SAMBA from a remote computer the connected harddrives started to spin up.
With this fork it shows the directory list and file structure, but doesn't spin up the drives. So when I open a movie file it plays fine for about 5 seconds and then crashes as the drive hasn't spin up yet.
Is there any parameter which influences this behavior?

John, thanks for your great fork and help here in the forum. Also a big thank you to all the other members for all their interesting messages.

 

[john9527]

Yesterday I've switched the firmware from merlin-380.58 to this fork. Everything went quite smooth without any big issues. And the AC56U is running fine. Big thanks John

Glad to hear it went OK. Just to double check before trying to answer the rest of your post that you did a factory reset after loading the firmware and reconfigured manually (didn't load a saved config file).

But I want to adress some points I've noticed:
1. Opening the web interface I've noticed some unused space in the upper part of the administration web interface and the missing "Status" register card, which shows the CPU und memory usage in the merlin firmware. Is this correct or is something broken?
Screenshot: https://pl.vc/1d0esm

Make sure your SSIDs don't contain any special characters including language double byte chars), only alphanumerics, dash and underscore. Including a single quote in the SSID is a common cause for the banner not displaying. Same advice for any client names. This fork doesn't have the CPU and memory graphs, only snapshots are available on the Tools tab.

2. First I had some issues to reconnect my USB harddrives formatted with NTFS via modified fstab. The reason was that this fork seems to use another NTFS driver by Paragon and the filesystem parameter has to be changed from "tntfs" to "ufsd".
So I've read the Paragon manual regarding available mount parameters and wanted to use the "discard" parameter to use the trim-feature for my SSD drive. But it's not mounting and is flagged as "invalid parameter".
Is the included Paragon driver too old and doesn't support the discard-parameter yet or isn't it supported by the kernel? Apart from that the 5TB UB drives are working fine.
Manual: http://download.paragon-software.com/doc/ntfs_hfs_linux_9_4_user_manual.pdf

Trim is not supported AFAIK. Attaching SSD drives has been a bit 'hit-or-miss', even on the latest Merlin.

3. I'm using a manually created hosts-file to block some malware- and ad-server. This hosts file has an filezise of about 14MB and was working fine with the merlin firmware.
With this fork I wasn't able to open any website as it seems to ran into an timeout. I also wasn't able to ping the website from my computer. Direct ping from the router was possible.
I'm now using an smaller version of the hosts-file with about 8MB size and it's working fine.
Is this an known limit with this fork or are there any options to use it like the merlin firmware?

This fork uses the same level of dnsmasq as the latest Merlin, so I don't know of any reason it shouldn't work. I know there are some users that have very large hosts files for adblocking.

4. There seems also another behavior of the spin up feature of the harddrives. With merlin firmware as I opened a shared directory via SAMBA from a remote computer the connected harddrives started to spin up.
With this fork it shows the directory list and file structure, but doesn't spin up the drives. So when I open a movie file it plays fine for about 5 seconds and then crashes as the drive hasn't spin up yet.
Is there any parameter which influences this behavior?

Again, should be no difference in the spinup. The only thing I can think of, is that I have linux caching on by default, while Merlin's default is to periodically flush all the internal linux caches. So, I may be caching the drive directory structure while Merlin isn't. But it shouldn't cause a problem as long as the drive has a reasonable spoinup time. If you want to try to emulate the default Merlin behavior, log into the router and enter
nvram set drop_caches=1
nvram commit
and reboot. The trade-off is the drive will need to spin-up more frequently.

 

[john9527]

Also, will a change of default behavior for wps button to toggle wifi be against user friendliness? We do know wps shouldn't b left enabled cause of security issues...

This one is tougher.....yes we all know that WPS shouldn't be used, but I have trouble disabling the function of a button label WPS by default when it comes to new users. Also, you should note, the ability to change the WPS behavior is a MIPS unique function, not available on the ARM routers.

 

[Santiago C]

Hi @john9527, how are you? I have a couple comments this time:

1. QoS question here: Do the rules apply to traffic originated in the router itself? let's say (hypothetically speaking here Mr. NSA) someone has a torrent client running on the router; would that traffic be subject to the QoS rules?
2. I have just changed my dnscrypt resolvers (already activated) and a bunch of services were restarted but for some reason dnsleaktest.com still stated my prior dnscrypt resolvers were being used, until I issued a "service restart_dnscrypt" and tried again
   
3. I was looking at openvpn.c and if I understood correctly, for a client, when cryptMode=TLS the client.ovpn file only has "up" and "down" scripts depending on the selection on the DNS field (line 280). While that might make sense, updown.sh is responsible for calling openvpn-event and in cases where it is not included in the client.ovpn file, then the openvpn-event script would not be executed. I know I could add a "up openvpn-event" line if I wanted to, but that will in turn prevent updown.sh from being executed at all since OpenVPN will only execute the last script. At the end of the day, it feels inconsistent; don't you think updown.sh should always be there even when it would only be invoking openvpn-event?
4. The cron job for the polling interval seems wrong, it executes "service vpnclient1 start" when it should execute "service start_vpnclient1"
5. Is there a reason why vpn certs have not being mvoed from nvram to jffs as in Merlin? I know it probably happened after this fork, but I am just guessing why it did not follow along when it could be a huge nvram space save, right?

 

[namtih]

Glad to hear it went OK. Just to double check before trying to answer the rest of your post that you did a factory reset after loading the firmware and reconfigured manually (didn't load a saved config file).

Yes, I did.

Make sure your SSIDs don't contain any special characters including language double byte chars), only alphanumerics, dash and underscore. Including a single quote in the SSID is a common cause for the banner not displaying. Same advice for any client names. This fork doesn't have the CPU and memory graphs, only snapshots are available on the Tools tab.

Both SSIDs and all clients don't have any special character.
The unused spaced isn't any real issue. It was only the first thing I've noticed after my first login that the alignment of the elements is a little bit strange.

Trim is not supported AFAIK. Attaching SSD drives has been a bit 'hit-or-miss', even on the latest Merlin.

Ok.

This fork uses the same level of dnsmasq as the latest Merlin, so I don't know of any reason it shouldn't work. I know there are some users that have very large hosts files for adblocking.

My, strange. Perhaps I will give it another try some time later. Or I just use the smaller version.

Again, should be no difference in the spinup. The only thing I can think of, is that I have linux caching on by default, while Merlin's default is to periodically flush all the internal linux caches. So, I may be caching the drive directory structure while Merlin isn't. But it shouldn't cause a problem as long as the drive has a reasonable spoinup time. If you want to try to emulate the default Merlin behavior, log into the router and enter
nvram set drop_caches=1
nvram commit
and reboot. The trade-off is the drive will need to spin-up more frequently.

Thanks, I will give it a try next weekend.


Another (very) small thing:
I've used the included "entware-setup.sh" script to install Entware and it's working fine.
But I've saw that it installed in some of the last steps some locals. It installed English and also Russian.
I don't know if Russian is really necessary and could save some space.

 

[wedwabbit]

Hi all,

I'm trying to add the following to dnsmasq.conf.add to make identifying devices easier. I don't want to assign IP addresses if possible.

dhcp-host=F0:F6:1CE:79:82,set:kids,veronicaipad
dhcp-host=A0:99:9B:CE:35:B7,set:kids,vschoolipad
dhcp-host=CC:2D:83:EF7:0D,set:kids,erinoppo9
dhcp-host=A0:99:9B:F2:CE:01,set:kids,eschoolipad
dhcp-host=44:2A:60:FC:20:92,set:kids,vairlaptop
dhcp-host=00:1E:C2:9F:4C:4D,set:kids,erinimac

They all seem to work fine (devices connect etc.) but the client status list and the dropdown boxes in "Parental Control" are empty. Any ideas?

As a workaround I added the devices to the manually assigned IP addresses table.

Thanks

 

[jail4ceos2]

My torrenting problem seems to have been solved by simply enabling QOS (with no rules), but I've only had one day of light activity. I was able to peg my 60Mb dowload max for the session. That may not be germane to this fork however.

My question is still, how does this fork allow for changing the output wattage? Does it allow one to set milliwatt output, or is it like the main Merlin is presenting it as a slider with vague words?

 

[punchsuckr]

I think I may have screwed up configuring the ovpn server... After a reset to factory, is there a way for the server to accept the previously used client.ovpn file?

I had the client ovpn file from the previous config, and I (maybe foolishly) copied over the certs and keys from that file to the "content modification of certs and keys" page in the openvpn server config options. Needless to say there weren't the dh parameters in the client ovpn file and i could not copy those.

After this, the previously used ovpn file still can't be used to connect, getting a bad ns cert type in leaf certificate error on the client.. When I try exporting an ovpn file from the admin page, that file now does not have the server certificate and private keys and instead the area looks like this:

</ca>
<cert>
    paste client certificate data here
</cert>
<key>
    paste client key data here
</key>

Can someone help please...?

EDIT: only the certificate and private key looks like the above, ca cert area has the data that I had previously copied over to the configuration page. If I open the content modification of keys and certs, I can see all three areas filled with the key information I pasted.

EDIT2: Had an old backup settings file I had made, restored, working fine. Cheers!

 

[ColinTaylor]

My question is still, how does this fork allow for changing the output wattage? Does it allow one to set milliwatt output, or is it like the main Merlin is presenting it as a slider with vague words?

It uses a milliwatt number. But bear in mind that whatever number you put in is translated behind the scenes into predefined "bands" of power. So, for example, there is no actual difference between entering 45, 50 or 55 mW, but there is between 65mW and 75mW.

 

[punchsuckr]

Thanks for letting me know that worked. I'll pick up a change so you won't need to add the router for the next release.

Btw John, when I restored settings in order to fix openvpn, it also restored https and a similar error to the process not responding was showing up in the log regarding httpd and ssl. I added the router's IP but it still continued..

EDIT: Again restored to reproduce the issue, the error "watchdog: restart httpd - SSL, error detected or process not responding (60)" shows up only twice it seems after a reboot. Will keep an eye if it comes up again.

 

[jail4ceos2]

Thanks, is 75mw the max? I vaguely remember being able to got up to 200mw in my WRT54. I think that power level was scuppered by the FCC?

I'm back to torrent problems, I think I'll try a clean install with this fork and hope that fixes things. The N66U used to handle the load.

Is there any easy software way to ascertain if the power supply, or the router itself, is dying?