Hello everyone, I just bought an RT-AX86U and flashed it from factory shipped firmware to
3.0.0.4.388_22068 from Asus website. Next up was to configure it to drop in to replace my old one with 50+ things on my network with 1/3 static IPs. This was to replace an aging RT-AC66U (non-B) Overall it is what I would expect, but one annoying issue that has already been mentioned in this thread is the router's desire to replace IP address with
www.asusrouter.com. I have OpenDNS IP addresses entered for family friendly content filtering under both IP4 (and IPv6 that only does malware I believe) which causes anything using DHCP on the network to get those as the DNS values as entry #1 and #2 with the router's IP as the third and final DNS value for IPV4. However, OpenDNS has no idea that my router's private IP is 192.168.X.X.
I can usually access the router with router.asus.com, but going to the IP address gets re-directed to
www.asusrouter.com. Sometimes I can log in, but then the web page I next click on is not accessible because
www.asusrouter.com/page_I_clicked_on is not accessible. Netgear routers do this too. At some point whatever address you get to the router with via your browser (IP or router.asus.com or
www.asusrouter.com), should be sufficient to access it. I understand it is easier in the app-of-the-week to have a single DNS entry and not write code to identify the IP address of the router you are behind, pass that back to the app, and use that for the web address. Anything cloud related to remote access gets ugly quickly and what probably drives a lot of this.
Randomly, pages on the router will not load completely, other times they will hang with a spinning hamster wheel of progress that never stops, or render a basic web page in all white with text until you refresh. I believe this all to be tied to intermittent DNS resolution between page renders even. DNS Caching should retain "
www.asusrouter.com" = 192.168.x.x but with how newer browsers want to support streaming updates, I believe it all gets screwed up. DD-WRT never replaced an IP address with a DNS name in the years I used that across several devices.
Two solutions come to mind - one, make the Router's IP the first DNS entry that DHCP issues to clients and cascade from there to using the desired public DNS of your choice. This has the added lag of every DNS request needing to hit the router and then the router redirect to the external DNS, but fixes the order of who can answer this one question correctly. Or two, stop overriding the web site address from whatever IP/address you provide to your browser and not forcibly replace it with an expected, but not in every configuration achievable resolution to a non publicly routable IP address.
I also have systems with other DNS hard coded to bypass content filtering, and they cannot reach
www.asusrouter.com at all, but magically router.asus.com can. I even hard coded
www.asusrouter.com into the one local host file to the IP address of my router with mixed results. I know someone will tell me to just use my ISP's DNS that is assigned, or to suck it up as I caused my own problem but the last two DNS outages on my ISP side took out most of the customers, but not me. I also hate their type-o interceptor crap, and they do not prevent malware/adult content across all my kids devices. This is basic DNS networking and being crafty. Please - don't be crafty, it causes other wierd problems that are often hard to troubleshoot.
Implementing IPv6 and v4 together is not easy, and having an unknown number of configurations with an unknown number of ISPs is an impossible task. Leaving the provided IP address in the URL works. Making the router the primary DNS with a local network's hosts as viable records including the router that the web GUI is forcing down your throat would also work. Only doing half may usually work, or at least in the test plans used before releasing the firmware to the public. The only reason I was able to configure my router was that it was not connected to the internet, and the OpenDNS servers were not accessible, leaving the router to properly resolve
www.asusrouter.com. Once I plugged in my WAN port - this all started, and the web GUI got more lag in rendering.
Thanks for making a great system overall, but this one issue is plaguing me and others. Perhaps no one else sets their DNS servers. I will have the family load-test the wifi tonight.
Squeegee