3.0.0.4.385_10000 woes

[houmi]

I've been having a lot of issues with this firmware on two RT-AC1900P routers, connected via ethernet back haul (1Gbps)

Router Issues:
- Every few days, I can't access the web GUI anymore, I can't restart httpd, and even reboot via ssh hangs and have to manually power off the router.
- erratic speed / slowdowns on the router but it fixes itself.

AIMesh Node:
- It goes offline every few days requiring a manually power restart.
- if I connect a device to a lan port, 10-20% of time the mesh node goes totally unstable with erratic speed/connectivity on the whole router but it eventually fixes itself.

I have already submitted a ticket to Asus.

The only thing I run on the router is traffic analyzer - statistics...

 

[follower]

I've been having a lot of issues with this firmware on two RT-AC1900P routers, connected via ethernet back haul (1Gbps)

Router Issues:
- Every few days, I can't access the web GUI anymore, I can't restart httpd, and even reboot via ssh hangs and have to manually power off the router.
- erratic speed / slowdowns on the router but it fixes itself.

AIMesh Node:
- It goes offline every few days requiring a manually power restart.
- if I connect a device to a lan port, 10-20% of time the mesh node goes totally unstable with erratic speed/connectivity on the whole router but it eventually fixes itself.

I have already submitted a ticket to Asus.

The only thing I run on the router is traffic analyzer - statistics...

That's a known issue. ASUS customer service don't know how to fix it. Don't expect anything from them. They know nothing. They will repeat " Factory reset~NVRAM clear"~~~. But it doesn't help at all.
https://www.snbforums.com/threads/a...-version-3-0-0-4-384-81116.59170/#post-529660

 

[Ronald Schwerer]

Maybe some of the affected users should get together and figure out what they have in common. This issue is not widespread and the vast majority of 68U (AC1900) users are not having this problem.
Just to state the obvious, after an NVRAM clear, don't restore your old backup settings. Reconfigure from scratch.

Also, if these issues just started with 385.10000, fall-back to the previous stable version and wait-out a solution.

 

[houmi]

Maybe some of the affected users should get together and figure out what they have in common. This issue is not widespread and the vast majority of 68U (AC1900) users are not having this problem.
Just to state the obvious, after an NVRAM clear, don't restore your old backup settings. Reconfigure from scratch.

Also, if these issues just started with 385.10000, fall-back to the previous stable version and wait-out a solution.

I've cleared NVRAM before on both (2 firmware releases ago), are we supposed to clear NVRAM every time we update to a new firmware ?

This isn't very practical... I doubt many folks who buy this routers are going (or would know) how to clear their NVRAMs, especially that these firmware are pushed to them.

 

[Ronald Schwerer]

I've cleared NVRAM before on both (2 firmware releases ago), are we supposed to clear NVRAM every time we update to a new firmware ?

I only do it when I have issues after installing new firmware. I didn't need to after installing 385.10000, but it is always the first thing to try.
First back-up your settings. Then factory reset. If the problem goes away, manually reconfigure. If not, reload the old settings and either live with it or fall back to last working firmware.

 

[OzarkEdge]

I've cleared NVRAM before on both (2 firmware releases ago), are we supposed to clear NVRAM every time we update to a new firmware ?

This isn't very practical... I doubt many folks who buy this routers are going (or would know) how to clear their NVRAMs, especially that these firmware are pushed to them.

This post discusses NVRAM and Factory Default Reset.

OE

 

[houmi]

I ended up factory resetting / nvram erase both routers. It was so bad, devices connected to AIMesh Node couldn't ping the router every so often even though those two are connected by ethernet.

I am thinking to set the second node as an AP and forget about AIMesh. That's what I used to do with Merlin before I jumped on the AImesh bandwagon. Since I've had a lot of issues with it (mostly with voip/facetime roaming in the house)

 

[OzarkEdge]

I ended up factory resetting / nvram erase both routers. It was so bad, devices connected to AIMesh Node couldn't ping the router every so often even though those two are connected by ethernet.

I am thinking to set the second node as an AP and forget about AIMesh. That's what I used to do with Merlin before I jumped on the AImesh bandwagon. Since I've had a lot of issues with it (mostly with voip/facetime roaming in the house)

Tip: Removing an AiMesh node automatically resets it, so this can save some manual reset effort.

OE

 

[SimoniZ]

The wireless option under the professional settings called airtime fairness has caused disconnects for my setup. I have this setting disabled for both the 2.4 and 5Ghz bands and it appears to have made my network a little more responsive. It might be worth giving this a shot to see if it helps to reduce the issues you are noticing.

 

[karma]

i have two rt-ac5300 running the latest 384 firmware with wireless backhaul and while configured as ai-mesh the setup was always having connectivity issues on the 2.4ghz band and also ethernet on the node. i know this is probably not what you want to hear but i finally gave up and put the second one in repeater mode and now things are stable. waiting to see what new wifi6 and wpa3 mesh systems come out this year. pity that there are so many issues with ai-mesh.

the advice to disable airtime fairness is a good one in general since when enabled it causes problems with older clients connected however i don't think it will solve your problem.

 

[houmi]

The wireless option under the professional settings called airtime fairness has caused disconnects for my setup. I have this setting disabled for both the 2.4 and 5Ghz bands and it appears to have made my network a little more responsive. It might be worth giving this a shot to see if it helps to reduce the issues you are noticing.

i have two rt-ac5300 running the latest 384 firmware with wireless backhaul and while configured as ai-mesh the setup was always having connectivity issues on the 2.4ghz band and also ethernet on the node. i know this is probably not what you want to hear but i finally gave up and put the second one in repeater mode and now things are stable. waiting to see what new wifi6 and wpa3 mesh systems come out this year. pity that there are so many issues with ai-mesh.

the advice to disable airtime fairness is a good one in general since when enabled it causes problems with older clients connected however i don't think it will solve your problem.

Per a friend's recommendation, I went back to Merlin. Using secondary as AP w/ ethernet back haul. I am currently on 384.14

I disabled Roaming Assistant since after using the Airport Utility (iPhone), I found out that I have a large overlap between the two routers in the house, and in the overlap, I had a lot of ping-pong between the two routers and tbh I didn't want to play too much with the RSSI numbers and TX power adjustments. I think Roaming assistant would work best when the two routers are very far from each other with minimal overlaps...

I walked around the house and I noticed the live tv app (no buffer) do switch fine between the two routers (small pause), the only thing I noticed was that facetime would switch sometimes to LTE instead of the other wifi, which seems like a facetime bug (I disabled cellular to test it)

 

[Smokindog]

If you've got an option for a wired backhaul I see no benefit and many pitfalls in using AiMesh over AP mode. One being the forced use of a single channel on all APs under AiMesh and when there is overlap as you point out, it's a headache. Besides, most of the control for roaming is in the client. The AP can help encourage roaming but ....

From what I saw when I trialed AiMesh, it would be a very last resort "tool" for me. I'm running all wired APs with multiple devices (2/AC3100, 1/AC68, 1/AC1900, 1/AC66), all with manually assigned channels, all radios on the same SSID, and have very few issues.

I also use the suggested settings found throughout this board for disabling certain features surrounding beam forming, roaming, .... All sound recommendations.

Last, I sometimes resort to a "recovery mode" reload when strange things have happened in the past with good success. Also, it never hurts to try a new wall wart when things make you scratch your head.

Per a friend's recommendation, I went back to Merlin. Using secondary as AP w/ ethernet back haul. I am currently on 384.14

I disabled Roaming Assistant since after using the Airport Utility (iPhone), I found out that I have a large overlap between the two routers in the house, and in the overlap, I had a lot of ping-pong between the two routers and tbh I didn't want to play too much with the RSSI numbers and TX power adjustments. I think Roaming assistant would work best when the two routers are very far from each other with minimal overlaps...

I walked around the house and I noticed the live tv app (no buffer) do switch fine between the two routers (small pause), the only thing I noticed was that facetime would switch sometimes to LTE instead of the other wifi, which seems like a facetime bug (I disabled cellular to test it)

 

[houmi]

If you've got an option for a wired backhaul I see no benefit and many pitfalls in using AiMesh over AP mode. One being the forced use of a single channel on all APs under AiMesh and when there is overlap as you point out, it's a headache. Besides, most of the control for roaming is in the client. The AP can help encourage roaming but ....

From what I saw when I trialed AiMesh, it would be a very last resort "tool" for me. I'm running all wired APs with multiple devices (2/AC3100, 1/AC68, 1/AC1900, 1/AC66), all with manually assigned channels, all radios on the same SSID, and have very few issues.

I also use the suggested settings found throughout this board for disabling certain features surrounding beam forming, roaming, .... All sound recommendations.

Last, I sometimes resort to a "recovery mode" reload when strange things have happened in the past with good success. Also, it never hurts to try a new wall wart when things make you scratch your head.

I agree that AIMesh makes things a lot easier, it's a nice wrap over AP, but it hides so much information that I dislike it, i.e. I wish you could have AIMesh with advanced settings where you could find tune certain parameters and a default settings to revert if things were going bad.

I currently have two SSID's that match on both router + AP.

The 2.4 Ghz channels are 6 & 11
Airtime Fairness: Disabled
Explicit/Universal Beamforming: Enabled
Roaming Assistant: Disabled

The 5.0 Ghz channels are 48 & 165
Airtime fairness: Disabled
802.11ac & Universal Beamforming: Enabled
Roaming Assistant : Disabled

I'll test with Beamforming settings disabled next per your suggestions.

Facetime switching is very weird, I think it's a client issue at this point. I disabled Facetime in cellular, and did another call this morning, if I walked from AP to router , I can see the wifi signal goes down, then strong again and Facetime pauses then disconnects but if I go the reverse way from router to AP, the signal goes down, then up, 3-4 second pause in Facetime (which is acceptable) then it works fine again.

I think this is something with Facetime code, because when I had LTE enabled for Facetime , it would connect to LTE then after a while connect back to wifi. I have not tried with other VoIP apps like Whatsapp, IMO, etc. to see how they behave...

I had more or less the same issues with AIMesh... again I liked the AIMesh concept, but I will never go back to it and rather play around with the AP settings.

Note that I never had any issues before on my Netgear routers (WNDR3700 router+AP), so I hope I can someday get this working as well on these two Asus routers.

 

[houmi]

BTW - very informative white paper @ Apple about wireless roaming:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203068

 

[Peter Abresch]

I've been having a lot of issues with this firmware on two RT-AC1900P routers, connected via ethernet back haul (1Gbps)

Router Issues:
- Every few days, I can't access the web GUI anymore, I can't restart httpd, and even reboot via ssh hangs and have to manually power off the router.
- erratic speed / slowdowns on the router but it fixes itself.

AIMesh Node:
- It goes offline every few days requiring a manually power restart.
- if I connect a device to a lan port, 10-20% of time the mesh node goes totally unstable with erratic speed/connectivity on the whole router but it eventually fixes itself.

I have already submitted a ticket to Asus.

The only thing I run on the router is traffic analyzer - statistics...

I am seeing this same issue. I am running RT-5300 main router at firmware 3.0.0.4.384.81219. I have airtime fairness disabled across the board. I run 3 RT-AC68U as AIMESH nodes. They were running firmware Version 3.0.0.4.384.81049. Life was good and never had an issue. I upgraded the RT AC68Us from Version 3.0.0.4.384.81049 to Version 3.0.0.4.385.10000 and noticed that every 3-7 days my network stops responding. I have to unplug the RT-5300 to power cycle to correct. This hang happens without warning. I will be chugging along and bang, it hangs. I have not determine any rhyme or reason. It is not CPU or memory overload issues. It did start after the AC68U upgrades but I only power cycle the RT-5300 to recover. Maybe the AIMESH nodes not playing nice with AIMESH router. I might revert back to 3.0.0.4.384.81049 as this has rendered my network unreliable.