The year in review
We're getting close to the end of 2018. The Asuswrt-Merlin project had its 6th birthday last April, and is still going strong. The move to the new 382 (now 384) codebase was completed. With that move we bid farewell to the RT-N66U and RT-AC66U, as was originally planned. We also had to leave the RT-AC56U behind later on, as Asus has now put it on their official End of Life list, meaning there won't be any further firmware updates from them. Since it's impossible for me to support a router without updated GPL releases from Asus, that means the RT-AC56U had to be dropped.
2018 also brought a new member to the family, the RT-AX88U. Based on a slightly updated version of the software platform used for the RT-AC86U, supporting that model required me (for the time being) to develop it somewhat in parallel of the other models, as Asus's firmware for that model is from a separate firmware branch. Once again I must thank Asus for providing me with a development sample, which has now replaced the RT-AC88U as my primary router at home. Just like its RT-AC86U sibbling, this router is a beast when it comes to VPN performance. Overall, this is a very nice model, it's only major drawback at this point is its high price.
The past year was mostly spent keeping in sync with Asus's own releases, and adding support for the new RT-AX88U. New feature development still remained a very low priority (as was planned), emphasis being put on merging new GPL releases, fixing known issues, and polishing various aspects of the firmware. The OpenVPN support received a lot of attention this year. That doesn't mean that people didn't get to play with new features, with Asus adding support for IFTTT, Alexa, IPSEC and Let's Encrypt. The third party developer community has also brought us their own implementations for new emerging technologies such as DNS-over-TLS. Existing projects such as Skynet and Diversion (formerly ABSolution) kept improving, and John's fork still is actively developed, providing support for owners of older models such as the RT-N66U.
One important change this year worth mentioning is the move from the obsolete ez-ipupdate to the actively maintained In-a-Dyn DDNS client, something I had been considering for a long time, but never found the time and will to get started. It required re-implementing Asus's own DDNS service as a plugin for it, and also ensuring proper support for all the previously available services. The change allows Asuswrt-Merlin to finally use HTTPS when sending DDNS update queries, in addition to making it easier for users to support a large number of additionnal DDNS services through custom config files (often without the need for any complex script).
One thing that changed this past year is how I obtain the GPL releases from Asus, getting them directly from them now instead of the support site. It usually means I get them a day or two before they appear on the website, and also I no longer need to constantly monitor a bunch of support pages to discover the availability of new GPL releases. This saves me a good amount of time.
In summary, 2018 saw the release of 11 separate releases (including the final 380.70 release). The user base seems to have increased, as traffic hitting the firmware update notification server have reached close to 150,000 unique users (!).
What's ahead for 2019?
I don't have any real concrete plan laid down at this time. I am currently working on 384.9, which should hopefully see the 384_45149 GPL being merged in (I only have two models done so far, the other GPLs only got released very recently and haven't been merged in yet). Beside the GPL update, 384.9 is shaping to be mostly a bugfix release. Things can still change however, as I am still in the early development stages of this release. The 384_45149 release from Asus resolves a few issues, but unfortunately introduces a number of new ones, so the situation will have to be evaluated during the course of the 384.9 development cycle.
Beyond that, the focus will most likely remain on keeping the codebase in sync with Asus's future releases, and doing the usual amount of polishing and bug hunting here and there. I intend to keep an eye on how the DNS over TLS technology is evolving to determine at some point if it's worth implementing or not.
The RT-AC3200 and RT-AC87U support has recently been in limbo, as Asus hasn't provided updated releases for a few months now, and they seem to have greatly reduced the release frequency for these two. I recently managed to obtain updated pre-compiled components from Asus, which I am gonna experiment with. If it works well, this might allow me to provide more frequent updates to these two models, by going to them to obtain these required binary objects. Things are a bit tricky however, as my firmware is based on a different code base (384) than what these two models officially support (382). If Asus doesn't migrate these to the 384 code base in the future, I might eventually reach a point where supporting these will no longer be realistically doable. We'll see how the situation evolves throughout 2019.
In closing
I want to thank the community for their interest in this project, and also for taking care of most of the end-user support, freeing me to focus on the development work. A special thank you to those who donated through Paypal, or contributed with code patches and bug reports. As always, I want to thank @thiggins for once again letting us borrow a corner of his forums. And finally I want to thank Asus who keep supporting this project in various ways, including providing me with development devices.
Have a great holiday, and a happy new year!
We're getting close to the end of 2018. The Asuswrt-Merlin project had its 6th birthday last April, and is still going strong. The move to the new 382 (now 384) codebase was completed. With that move we bid farewell to the RT-N66U and RT-AC66U, as was originally planned. We also had to leave the RT-AC56U behind later on, as Asus has now put it on their official End of Life list, meaning there won't be any further firmware updates from them. Since it's impossible for me to support a router without updated GPL releases from Asus, that means the RT-AC56U had to be dropped.
2018 also brought a new member to the family, the RT-AX88U. Based on a slightly updated version of the software platform used for the RT-AC86U, supporting that model required me (for the time being) to develop it somewhat in parallel of the other models, as Asus's firmware for that model is from a separate firmware branch. Once again I must thank Asus for providing me with a development sample, which has now replaced the RT-AC88U as my primary router at home. Just like its RT-AC86U sibbling, this router is a beast when it comes to VPN performance. Overall, this is a very nice model, it's only major drawback at this point is its high price.
The past year was mostly spent keeping in sync with Asus's own releases, and adding support for the new RT-AX88U. New feature development still remained a very low priority (as was planned), emphasis being put on merging new GPL releases, fixing known issues, and polishing various aspects of the firmware. The OpenVPN support received a lot of attention this year. That doesn't mean that people didn't get to play with new features, with Asus adding support for IFTTT, Alexa, IPSEC and Let's Encrypt. The third party developer community has also brought us their own implementations for new emerging technologies such as DNS-over-TLS. Existing projects such as Skynet and Diversion (formerly ABSolution) kept improving, and John's fork still is actively developed, providing support for owners of older models such as the RT-N66U.
One important change this year worth mentioning is the move from the obsolete ez-ipupdate to the actively maintained In-a-Dyn DDNS client, something I had been considering for a long time, but never found the time and will to get started. It required re-implementing Asus's own DDNS service as a plugin for it, and also ensuring proper support for all the previously available services. The change allows Asuswrt-Merlin to finally use HTTPS when sending DDNS update queries, in addition to making it easier for users to support a large number of additionnal DDNS services through custom config files (often without the need for any complex script).
One thing that changed this past year is how I obtain the GPL releases from Asus, getting them directly from them now instead of the support site. It usually means I get them a day or two before they appear on the website, and also I no longer need to constantly monitor a bunch of support pages to discover the availability of new GPL releases. This saves me a good amount of time.
In summary, 2018 saw the release of 11 separate releases (including the final 380.70 release). The user base seems to have increased, as traffic hitting the firmware update notification server have reached close to 150,000 unique users (!).
What's ahead for 2019?
I don't have any real concrete plan laid down at this time. I am currently working on 384.9, which should hopefully see the 384_45149 GPL being merged in (I only have two models done so far, the other GPLs only got released very recently and haven't been merged in yet). Beside the GPL update, 384.9 is shaping to be mostly a bugfix release. Things can still change however, as I am still in the early development stages of this release. The 384_45149 release from Asus resolves a few issues, but unfortunately introduces a number of new ones, so the situation will have to be evaluated during the course of the 384.9 development cycle.
Beyond that, the focus will most likely remain on keeping the codebase in sync with Asus's future releases, and doing the usual amount of polishing and bug hunting here and there. I intend to keep an eye on how the DNS over TLS technology is evolving to determine at some point if it's worth implementing or not.
The RT-AC3200 and RT-AC87U support has recently been in limbo, as Asus hasn't provided updated releases for a few months now, and they seem to have greatly reduced the release frequency for these two. I recently managed to obtain updated pre-compiled components from Asus, which I am gonna experiment with. If it works well, this might allow me to provide more frequent updates to these two models, by going to them to obtain these required binary objects. Things are a bit tricky however, as my firmware is based on a different code base (384) than what these two models officially support (382). If Asus doesn't migrate these to the 384 code base in the future, I might eventually reach a point where supporting these will no longer be realistically doable. We'll see how the situation evolves throughout 2019.
In closing
I want to thank the community for their interest in this project, and also for taking care of most of the end-user support, freeing me to focus on the development work. A special thank you to those who donated through Paypal, or contributed with code patches and bug reports. As always, I want to thank @thiggins for once again letting us borrow a corner of his forums. And finally I want to thank Asus who keep supporting this project in various ways, including providing me with development devices.
Have a great holiday, and a happy new year!
