AC86U sometimes powers completely off during reboot

[JS_racer]

thanks for the welcome guys, lol yeah, seems i'm late to the party.
anyways, did a reboot from the router webpage again this morning, no issues, cycled just fine.
few sips of morning coffee, i see this problem is kinda random,

as far as my config, no scripts, few tweaks based on recommendations here, and a few fixed ip's ....... boring i know, right!! lol

 

[jsbeddow]

While I used to see the occasional hang upon a soft reboot (86U), I have to say I haven't seen it happen in at least the last few months. Of course, I never tempt fate by doing a remote reboot either, but is it possible that Asus finally slipped in a fix for this issue recently? I certainly haven't had a hang on 384.17 or 384.18 alpha... just speculation, as it never seemed to be resolved whether this was a hardware or firmware issue.
Anyone else notice similar (good) behaviour? Hard to prove a negative, as I rarely reboot anyway, so I am looking for others experiences.

 

[thelonelycoder]

While I used to see the occasional hang upon a soft reboot (86U), I have to say I haven't seen it happen in at least the last few months. Of course, I never tempt fate by doing a remote reboot either, but is it possible that Asus finally slipped in a fix for this issue recently? I certainly haven't had a hang on 384.17 or 384.18 alpha... just speculation, as it never seemed to be resolved whether this was a hardware or firmware issue.
Anyone else notice similar (good) behaviour? Hard to prove a negative, as I rarely reboot anyway, so I am looking for others experiences.

My main test router is a 86U, on 384.18 alpha, it gets rebooted and cold booted several times a day when coding.
Two days ago it had again that resting bitch phase ( ).
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

 

[madfusker]

Damn... Got excited for a second. But I haven't tested fate either and I'm so used to manually going and pulling the plug. I will start using console reboot more aggressively and see what I find, but doesn't sound like any change. Get it together ASUS!!!

 

[miazza]

I had the issue yesterday when I forced a reboot in order to try a USB remount. It was few months I was not experiencing the issue....

 

[Giuse1977]

Joining the club right now.. my 3 days old 86u just turned off after a reboot. The reboot was required because all the devices on the guest network were offline (uptime was no more than 6 hours) luckily I am well in time to send it back to Amazon, but still a pity

 

[Asad Ali]

Joining the club right now.. my 3 days old 86u just turned off after a reboot. The reboot was required because all the devices on the guest network were offline (uptime was no more than 6 hours) luckily I am well in time to send it back to Amazon, but still a pity

That's a sort of manufacturing fault in AC86U (still no one is able to diagnose what exactly) so sending it back to Amazon is useless if you're doing it to get a replacement unit.

 

[Giuse1977]

That's a sort of manufacturing fault in AC86U (still no one is able to diagnose what exactly) so sending it back to Amazon is useless if you're doing it to get a replacement unit.

I would switch back to 56U.. my 2 cents, the first time it happened was after playing with VLAN setup in LAN panel (to see the behavior of brctl and understand how to create a tagged vlan on wan). I did many reboots so far, and except losing some static dhcp settings and ports forwarding, it was working well. Crazy bug, indeed.. this thread goes 2 years in the past and still nobody has a clue on it..

 

[Zonkd]

While I used to see the occasional hang upon a soft reboot (86U), I have to say I haven't seen it happen in at least the last few months. Of course, I never tempt fate by doing a remote reboot either, but is it possible that Asus finally slipped in a fix for this issue recently? I certainly haven't had a hang on 384.17 or 384.18 alpha... just speculation, as it never seemed to be resolved whether this was a hardware or firmware issue.
Anyone else notice similar (good) behaviour? Hard to prove a negative, as I rarely reboot anyway, so I am looking for others experiences.

Same, I went from seeing the issue consistently since buying, but in recent months the problem disappeared. I reboot infrequently and clean flash latest firmwares every three months. That said, a few weeks ago the problem reappeared just once during a soft reboot. I couldn’t reproduce it. AC86U is a PITA. Brilliant when it’s working though.

 

[Zonkd]

My main test router is a 86U, on 384.18 alpha, it gets rebooted and cold booted several times a day when coding.
Two days ago it had again that resting bitch phase ( ).
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Cursed silicon. Should’ve remained sand on the beach.

 

[MarkyPancake]

I noticed my 2017 AC86U did this when I first got it, but I can't remember the firmware version I was running back then, other than it was Merlin, as that's the first thing I did to it before it went into service.

In more recent times I was running Merlin 384.12 on it for a long time and only a couple of months ago updated it to 384.17 and more recently 384.18 and across all those versions I haven't had the reboot from admin pages issue.

 

[thecheapseats]

Two days ago it had again that resting bitch phase

+5000 for 'resting bitch'... very accurate... I've had three of these routers go braindead on a warm reboot... thought it was a feature to get me to walk around a bit...

 

[brec]

19 days ago my first AC86U was delivered. In that time I rebooted it lots o' times without failure. Yesterday my second AC86U was delivered. Today, on maybe the sixth time I rebooted it, it died. The back says it was made in Vietnam in 2020.

 

[bbunge]

19 days ago my first AC86U was delivered. In that time I rebooted it lots o' times without failure. Yesterday my second AC86U was delivered. Today, on maybe the sixth time I rebooted it, it died. The back says it was made in Vietnam in 2020.

May be an issue with the firmware. Had that happen a couple days ago when I was testing Merlin beta 384.19. Went back to Asus firmware and have had no issues. Do a WPS reset and refresh the firmware.

 

[lighting]

I manage two RT-AC86U routers with rMerlin, currently 384.18. BOTH have had the no lights on dead router problem. I've definitely had this happen (this morning at 5AM) when the Reboot Scheduler tried to do its thing - the router never woke up until I manually cycled power. I hadn't previously associated the problem with scheduled reboots -- and just turned that off on my home office router. I'm not clear whether the Reboot Scheduler is doing a Service Reboot or the standard (substandard) simple Reboot. But if Service Reboot avoids this problem then probably the scheduler is doing a regular reboot? Meanwhile I'm turning off the scheduled reboot, which I thought would improve stability.

 

[gattaca]

I've posted before about this one I think. My gut says the standard PSU unit is not adequate when the system is booting to carry the full load of the router and things shutdown. I switched to a ASUS PSU with more AMPs than the supplied unit and knock on wood, I've not had another "off on reboot" happen in 2+ years. I only reboot during upgrades or massive power failures. My routers, modem etc, are all supplied by a sine-wave UPS for stability during "blinks..." I had the power off on reboot happen many times before I replaced my PSU. Just my theory - YMMV. Stay safe, stay alive. Peace.

 

[shabbs]

Do you guys regularly reboot your routers or only when there's an issue or a firmware upgrade?

I used to do them once a week but lately, I've just been letting them run until either there's an issue that can only be fixed via reboot or I do a firmware update.

 

[CaptnDanLKW]

This is an issues which has been discussed in its own thread and many other threads. The RT-AC86U has a known hardware flaw who's root problem is in the Broadcom Silicon, no firmware or manufacturing location is going to fix it. The only thing would be for Asus to release a new revision, containing a different SoC or SoC stepping - assuming Broadcom even has one.

It's a roll the dice on a restart - it can restart 20 times without issue then the next two times it requires a power cycle.

 

[Phil413]

This is an issues which has been discussed in its own thread and many other threads. The RT-AC86U has a known hardware flaw who's root problem is in the Broadcom Silicon, no firmware or manufacturing location is going to fix it. The only thing would be for Asus to release a new revision, containing a different SoC or SoC stepping - assuming Broadcom even has one.

It's a roll the dice on a restart - it can restart 20 times without issue then the next two times it requires a power cycle.

I don't know if this needs to be a new topic or not so I apologize in advance. I wanted to ask a question based on this comment. I currently have the RT-AC68U and I just ordered the RT-AC86U (I can return it) for better openVPN speed. With the Broadcom SoC being flawed, what other routers would you recommend so I can get better VPN performance? [I expect to see ~80 mpbs performance just like through the TorGuard app on my phone and computers. My RT-AC68U only gets ~20 mpbs.]


Thanks!

 

[Pergola Fabio]

guys, is this issue ever fixed, i want to buy 2 additional rt-ac86u to create a mesh

is there maybe already a new revision out?

also, is this issue only present when you do a reboot command? or can it also happen on power issues
lets say, there is no power in hosue anymore, power comes back will it then also be stuck in the "power off" state?