Michael Franklin
New Around Here
I have had my Ac68u router for several months now and it has worked faithfully and without fail. I was googling ways to increase the signal strength when I came across this forum. I have been tinkering with it for hours on end ever since and am seriously sleep deprived.
I have tried over the course of several days, to setup a stable minidlna music server. This had led to a personal struggle between man and router over the course of a week. At this point the router is the victor, and to the victor go the spoils. I have left it alone in peace all day.
The Struggle:
After suffering horrible streaming performance with the Asus firmware, I flashed my router with the latest Merlin release. I setup a WD hard drive formatted as an NTFS volume (default cluster size) that contains a few thousand songs on the USB 3 port. I set Samba to share the folders with my Windows 7 system without problems. Music would stream, but not well. The router would hiccup due to the never ending scanning of the minidlna process which led to an angry wife not being able to watch funny cat videos on Facebook. I followed a most excellent guide posted here that recommended partitioning the hard drive into an ntfs volume for the media and a 1gb ext3 partition at the end of the volume. Did this. Setup a custom minidlna.conf in the /jffs/configs directory. Verified the drive was being mounted correctly and the custom script was being run. All is well until I drag and drop a few songs from my Windows 7 desktop computer to one of the folders on the WD drive being shared. The drive starts having directory errors in the ntfs volume. Unmount the drive, plug it into my main system, run chkdsk. no errors. Repartition, reformat (ntfs, ext3) copy songs back to drive over the course of several hours. Plug back into router. All is well. Doesn't stream very well, but I chalked that up to my daughters laptop downloading / building a library with the resource hog Windows Media Player. After breathing a sigh of relief that the cpu load was going back down from 100% (both cores) from the scanning, I attempt to copy a movie to the drive. Drive again starts having errors.
I have read through the forum and have seen that lots of people have had errors with USB drive corruption and the ac68u router. My question is: has anyone been able to set this router up successfully as a media streamer? Has anyone had any luck with increasing the deplorable performance of the usb ports? At this point, I am just thinking about building a headless box to handle the streaming. Maybe I am expecting too much from the router.
I'm sorry for the long post, but as I said, I'm sleep deprived, I have googled too much, I have 600 tabs open on my browser and accidentally keep closing tabs that I'm sure contained the solution to all my problems, and I am hyped up on energy drinks.
Michael
I have tried over the course of several days, to setup a stable minidlna music server. This had led to a personal struggle between man and router over the course of a week. At this point the router is the victor, and to the victor go the spoils. I have left it alone in peace all day.
The Struggle:
After suffering horrible streaming performance with the Asus firmware, I flashed my router with the latest Merlin release. I setup a WD hard drive formatted as an NTFS volume (default cluster size) that contains a few thousand songs on the USB 3 port. I set Samba to share the folders with my Windows 7 system without problems. Music would stream, but not well. The router would hiccup due to the never ending scanning of the minidlna process which led to an angry wife not being able to watch funny cat videos on Facebook. I followed a most excellent guide posted here that recommended partitioning the hard drive into an ntfs volume for the media and a 1gb ext3 partition at the end of the volume. Did this. Setup a custom minidlna.conf in the /jffs/configs directory. Verified the drive was being mounted correctly and the custom script was being run. All is well until I drag and drop a few songs from my Windows 7 desktop computer to one of the folders on the WD drive being shared. The drive starts having directory errors in the ntfs volume. Unmount the drive, plug it into my main system, run chkdsk. no errors. Repartition, reformat (ntfs, ext3) copy songs back to drive over the course of several hours. Plug back into router. All is well. Doesn't stream very well, but I chalked that up to my daughters laptop downloading / building a library with the resource hog Windows Media Player. After breathing a sigh of relief that the cpu load was going back down from 100% (both cores) from the scanning, I attempt to copy a movie to the drive. Drive again starts having errors.
I have read through the forum and have seen that lots of people have had errors with USB drive corruption and the ac68u router. My question is: has anyone been able to set this router up successfully as a media streamer? Has anyone had any luck with increasing the deplorable performance of the usb ports? At this point, I am just thinking about building a headless box to handle the streaming. Maybe I am expecting too much from the router.
I'm sorry for the long post, but as I said, I'm sleep deprived, I have googled too much, I have 600 tabs open on my browser and accidentally keep closing tabs that I'm sure contained the solution to all my problems, and I am hyped up on energy drinks.
Michael
