Release ASUS RT-AX86 Series(RT-AX86U/RT-AX86S) Firmware version 3.0.0.4.388.22068

[SeriousFamily]

not to sure what lag you guys are facing but every time i log into the router with firefox to check for it i cant find it. I can move around the router tabs without problems.

my devices have no problems with disconcerting on any wireless band using fixed channels.

Uptime	16 days 23 hour(s) 18 minute(s) 12 seconds

 

[ComputerSteve]

I notice that using an AX86U on the latest firmware as a node results in the connection eventually dropping. I have tried an earlier firmware and that seems to stop. I am using ethernet backhaul 2.5gb between 2 AX86U's. I have also changed the node now to an AX11000 and the problem has went away. Meaning my connection is now stable with the AX86U as the main router and the AX11000 as the node. If I change the AX11000 back to the AX86U I again randomly loose internet on all the devices connected to the node.

 

[vicosphi]

Same thing happens to me but I downgrade to 388.20566 as 21709’s wireguard is pretty unable for me. The router will hang and needs a reboot when I am downloading stuff with wireguard on.

I think stable Wireguard is still a few months away for Asus routers. That's why I'm just going to get a Qualcomm chipset gl.inet router that can do 400Mbps wireguard.
EDIT: Switched to Asus Merlin 388.2_alpha1 and Wireguard is running fine now.

 

[bbunge]

Just reporting that this firmware version continues to work well for me. I have added an AC66U_B1 as an AiMesh node in my basement for a couple of clients that are stuck down there and for something to connect my 10/100 PoE switch (The AX86U complains when it does not have a good GB connection to the Ethernet ports).
With other Asus routers getting firmware upgrades in the past week I would guess the AX86U is in line for one as well.

 

[bitsbytes]

Just reporting that this firmware version continues to work well for me. I have added an AC66U_B1 as an AiMesh node in my basement for a couple of clients that are stuck down there and for something to connect my 10/100 PoE switch (The AX86U complains when it does not have a good GB connection to the Ethernet ports).
With other Asus routers getting firmware upgrades in the past week I would guess the AX86U is in line for one as well.

I second that. this firmware has been working well for me. no more node problems and Wi-Fi performance has been solid.

 

[Squeegee]

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

 

[bbunge]

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

Your write up for your configuration is a bit confusing. I think I understand that you have entries in LAN/DHCP Server/DNS Server 1 and 2 for OpenDNS? If so I would recommend you set the OpenDNS server in WAN/Internet Connection/DNS Server as well as the IPV6 setup page and let the router act as a caching DNS server as it is intended to work. It will actually be faster than setting DNS servers at the client. You can also enable DoT which will enable DNS security!
As for you resolving issues to the router, are you using the default router IP of 192.168.50.1 and if not why not? I would guess that your "static" IP addresses are actually manually assigned addresses and those can be manually assigned to the 192.168.50.0/24 subnet. If you actually have set up static addresses on 20 + clients then you have a problem. Recocnfigure them to use the router as a DNS server.
If you used a config file from the AC66U to set up the AX86U you did wrong! Factory reset the AX86U and configure it manually.
If you want to reuse the DDNS address from the old router and you were using the Asus DDNS service make sure you unregister the old router DDNS before you register the new router with the same DDNS.

 

[Squeegee]

Your write up for your configuration is a bit confusing. I think I understand that you have entries in LAN/DHCP Server/DNS Server 1 and 2 for OpenDNS? If so I would recommend you set the OpenDNS server in WAN/Internet Connection/DNS Server as well as the IPV6 setup page and let the router act as a caching DNS server as it is intended to work. It will actually be faster than setting DNS servers at the client. You can also enable DoT which will enable DNS security!
As for you resolving issues to the router, are you using the default router IP of 192.168.50.1 and if not why not? I would guess that your "static" IP addresses are actually manually assigned addresses and those can be manually assigned to the 192.168.50.0/24 subnet. If you actually have set up static addresses on 20 + clients then you have a problem. Recocnfigure them to use the router as a DNS server.
If you used a config file from the AC66U to set up the AX86U you did wrong! Factory reset the AX86U and configure it manually.
If you want to reuse the DDNS address from the old router and you were using the Asus DDNS service make sure you unregister the old router DDNS before you register the new router with the same DDNS.

Apologies - I was attempting to write up after cutting over to the new router and trying to work from home under a deadline. I never backed up or restored a config to this new unit.

Changing my LAN DNS and WAN DNS as you suggested seems to have resolved the "cannot connect to server" messages on multiple laptops when accessing the Web GUI. I missed that in my rush to setup the router last night before bed to be ready to swap it out today before work after everyone else was gone to avoid any family complaints.
Thank you

My intention was to swap out the AC66U after setting up the AX86U, and change the new SSID from "SSID2" to "SSID" with the AC66U powered down. Everything I have in house works after this just like in the past. The web GUI on the router with it's override/redirect behavior was the only problem. With the new MAC address on the AP, every Windows PC was wanting the new SSID password because the AP MAC address has changed from it's records. All of the embedded Linux, Mac, phones, tablets and streaming devices using Wifi were fine with the AP swap. All 17 things with Ethernet cables were fine, static IP or DHCP. My family typically consumes around 1.2TB per month of data on the home internet connection.

Here's the rundown in details of what I did and why:

I did the initial setup out of the box with the wizard while plugged into nothing other than one laptop on a LAN port, and that laptop already had the new Asus firmware downloaded. Once I got through the 2-3 mandatory first power-on steps, I upgraded the firmware, rebooted the router and it was fine only connected to the one laptop via Ethernet. No reset was done after the new firmware was installed.

From there I went through and manually entered in my wifi's info with a 2 at the end of the SSID to not confuse anything in the house, but be ready. I changed the router IP from 192.168.50.1 to 192.168.X.1 which changes the relevant related values on the router, and shrunk the DHCP IP pool to 100-254 as I have various thing with static IPs all below 100 and setup three DHCP static addresses for the MAC addresses that are known non-static IP capable devices. I moved the 2.5GB port to the WAN port to hopefully allow the eventual internet speed upgrade to be balanced across wifi and ethernet ports across the house.

I have VMs that I run at times on multiple pieces of hardware needing connectivity to each other. Windows printing will randomly stop working unless you pin the printer IP address and override/delete the windows 10 printer ports with GUID names and go oldschool with TCP/IP ports. This is across seven different physical Windows PCs (home and pro, 10 and 11) to two different branded Ethernet attached printers. Similar TCP/IP port setup was needed for getting the Macbook to print reliably too. Not using a static IP seems fine for a week or two, and then all things go sideways, or one PC will knock off the previous PC's ability. I also do not need everything I print to go through the MS cloud to come back into my home. I have MythTV back-end setup with remote database access for additional in-house front-end PCs tied to multiple network based tuners. I have found more things work better with a static IP such as any NAS, databases and VoIP adapter with port forwarding that is needed for inbound calls verses upnp so the device or service going offline at the worst possible time or not working for a few days when you think it is. Clients (phones/tablets/PCs) and streaming devices are fine for DHCP if they are not hosting anything, but devices offering service are not reliable on DHCP in my experience unless you have DHCP bound to the MAC address as a last resort. I do not intend to enter the MAC address of every device into my router in part because some devices still have crappy names that I do not have the drive to track down who manufactured it or what adapter did they source this week to use in the device to ID it to name it to retain the IP address correctly in the pool.

Changing the router IP address is quicker on one device and has never been a problem with any of the last six routers that have cycled through my home in 20 years, including the previous RT-AC66U. Others have visited, adults and high school friends of my kids, and they have commented on how well our home internet works, and how fast and stable it is compared to theirs. Asus makes great hardware for home users. The user configuration was what bit me this time, and has me questioning one setup I did six months ago with an RT-AC65 where I implemented Cloudfair's DNS for content filtering.

Thank you again. I will report back if I have any other questions.

 

[TexasFlood]

not to sure what lag you guys are facing but every time i log into the router with firefox to check for it i cant find it. I can move around the router tabs without problems.

my devices have no problems with disconcerting on any wireless band using fixed channels.

​

Uptime	16 days 23 hour(s) 18 minute(s) 12 seconds

Mine is up 20 days with n

not to sure what lag you guys are facing but every time i log into the router with firefox to check for it i cant find it. I can move around the router tabs without problems.

my devices have no problems with disconcerting on any wireless band using fixed channels.

​

Uptime	16 days 23 hour(s) 18 minute(s) 12 seconds

Maybe it's browser related. I don't use Firefox and haven't experienced any such issues

 

[bbunge]

Apologies - I was attempting to write up after cutting over to the new router and trying to work from home under a deadline. I never backed up or restored a config to this new unit.

Changing my LAN DNS and WAN DNS as you suggested seems to have resolved the "cannot connect to server" messages on multiple laptops when accessing the Web GUI. I missed that in my rush to setup the router last night before bed to be ready to swap it out today before work after everyone else was gone to avoid any family complaints.
Thank you

My intention was to swap out the AC66U after setting up the AX86U, and change the new SSID from "SSID2" to "SSID" with the AC66U powered down. Everything I have in house works after this just like in the past. The web GUI on the router with it's override/redirect behavior was the only problem. With the new MAC address on the AP, every Windows PC was wanting the new SSID password because the AP MAC address has changed from it's records. All of the embedded Linux, Mac, phones, tablets and streaming devices using Wifi were fine with the AP swap. All 17 things with Ethernet cables were fine, static IP or DHCP. My family typically consumes around 1.2TB per month of data on the home internet connection.

Here's the rundown in details of what I did and why:

I did the initial setup out of the box with the wizard while plugged into nothing other than one laptop on a LAN port, and that laptop already had the new Asus firmware downloaded. Once I got through the 2-3 mandatory first power-on steps, I upgraded the firmware, rebooted the router and it was fine only connected to the one laptop via Ethernet. No reset was done after the new firmware was installed.

From there I went through and manually entered in my wifi's info with a 2 at the end of the SSID to not confuse anything in the house, but be ready. I changed the router IP from 192.168.50.1 to 192.168.X.1 which changes the relevant related values on the router, and shrunk the DHCP IP pool to 100-254 as I have various thing with static IPs all below 100 and setup three DHCP static addresses for the MAC addresses that are known non-static IP capable devices. I moved the 2.5GB port to the WAN port to hopefully allow the eventual internet speed upgrade to be balanced across wifi and ethernet ports across the house.

I have VMs that I run at times on multiple pieces of hardware needing connectivity to each other. Windows printing will randomly stop working unless you pin the printer IP address and override/delete the windows 10 printer ports with GUID names and go oldschool with TCP/IP ports. This is across seven different physical Windows PCs (home and pro, 10 and 11) to two different branded Ethernet attached printers. Similar TCP/IP port setup was needed for getting the Macbook to print reliably too. Not using a static IP seems fine for a week or two, and then all things go sideways, or one PC will knock off the previous PC's ability. I also do not need everything I print to go through the MS cloud to come back into my home. I have MythTV back-end setup with remote database access for additional in-house front-end PCs tied to multiple network based tuners. I have found more things work better with a static IP such as any NAS, databases and VoIP adapter with port forwarding that is needed for inbound calls verses upnp so the device or service going offline at the worst possible time or not working for a few days when you think it is. Clients (phones/tablets/PCs) and streaming devices are fine for DHCP if they are not hosting anything, but devices offering service are not reliable on DHCP in my experience unless you have DHCP bound to the MAC address as a last resort. I do not intend to enter the MAC address of every device into my router in part because some devices still have crappy names that I do not have the drive to track down who manufactured it or what adapter did they source this week to use in the device to ID it to name it to retain the IP address correctly in the pool.

Changing the router IP address is quicker on one device and has never been a problem with any of the last six routers that have cycled through my home in 20 years, including the previous RT-AC66U. Others have visited, adults and high school friends of my kids, and they have commented on how well our home internet works, and how fast and stable it is compared to theirs. Asus makes great hardware for home users. The user configuration was what bit me this time, and has me questioning one setup I did six months ago with an RT-AC65 where I implemented Cloudfair's DNS for content filtering.

Thank you again. I will report back if I have any other questions.

Seems like you have things working well!
I, too, have used the same SSID and LAN IP range on the last two routers. I start my DHCP at 192.168.50.20 which leaves space for my security cams, NVR and NAS. Only one Canon WIFI printer that gets assigned the same IP address time after time but I manually assign it anyway. I have tested other versions of firmware so often it only takes me about 15 minutes to reconfigure the router from reset.
You now have the ability to use DoT and DNSSEC on your WAN setup. I use Cloudflare Secure which is a manual setup (1.1.1.2 and 1.0.0.2 with security.cloudflare-dns.com). You can also put your guests on a guest WIFI which also works well for the odd IoT device.
You may find it best to select fixed bandwidth and channels for WIFI. For now I did not enable 160 MHz as it can cause the band to switch channels and I do not use DFS as some of my older clients do not like it.

 

[Squeegee]

Seems like you have things working well!
I, too, have used the same SSID and LAN IP range on the last two routers. I start my DHCP at 192.168.50.20 which leaves space for my security cams, NVR and NAS. Only one Canon WIFI printer that gets assigned the same IP address time after time but I manually assign it anyway. I have tested other versions of firmware so often it only takes me about 15 minutes to reconfigure the router from reset.
You now have the ability to use DoT and DNSSEC on your WAN setup. I use Cloudflare Secure which is a manual setup (1.1.1.2 and 1.0.0.2 with security.cloudflare-dns.com). You can also put your guests on a guest WIFI which also works well for the odd IoT device.
You may find it best to select fixed bandwidth and channels for WIFI. For now I did not enable 160 MHz as it can cause the band to switch channels and I do not use DFS as some of my older clients do not like it.

So far things seem good, but there are the occasional timeouts on the webGUI from DHCP clients, but once I get things configured the way I want, I should stay out of the router. I still do not like the URL redirect idea being done. I may go Merlin after a few weeks.

One side note, I manually set my router's 5ghz band to a low channel as both of my kids have drones for racing with FPV. They use the 5Ghz band for their on-board video camera transmission via an analog signal that does not work well with 5ghz wifi, more of a jammer across 80% of the channels. The "racing bands" as the industry call them knock out the upper channels due to RF overlap. Nothing like one kid on the xbox and the other kid powers up his NewBeeDrone for indoor practice/racing and takes out the wifi on the xbox and every other 5ghz device in use. I left it at 160mhz bandwidth for now, if it works better, yay. I usually pin my 2ghz too but not yet. I can now stream from the silicon dust quad tuner to VLC over 2ghz where the AC66U would buffer.

One neighbor has an Erro or whatever mesh that came with his fiber install and that started to use the same 5ghz channel. I swear that crap is like a whack-a-mole if you ever watch it in a wifi scanner. Up on 36, down on 36, up on 44 down on 44, up on 40, down on 40, Up on 40 again, down on 40, up on 149, down on 149....

Thank you again.

 

[Jbennett360]

Been using this for 12 days 16 hour(s).

No issues with GUI lag

 

[scajjr2]

Running this for a couple weeks and no issues on our 86U, everything working as it should.

sam

 

[tithitoy]

I discover "system log - port forwarding" web ui corrupted - auto logout when navigator back

 

[iFrogMac]

Hey all, I'm finally able to report on the latest firmware. So far it's working without issue. I'm finally in my own place again, and was able to put the Cox supplied gateway into bridge mode, so I could once again use the Asus Router.

So far, no problems, and no lag in the web UI. I've been in and out of it a few times checking and making changes.

 

[FIN]

Mine is up 20 days with n


Maybe it's browser related. I don't use Firefox and haven't experienced any such issues

i dont think sow. i used differebt brousers (safari ios? opera? edge? chrome) and i have gui lags on all of it. back to the previos fw.

 

[tallytr]

i dont think sow. i used differebt brousers (safari ios? opera? edge? chrome) and i have gui lags on all of it. back to the previos fw.

same here, the GUI on this firmware is laggy for me as well (but not always), I don't care as long as the box is working, and it is working just fine otherwise...

 

[iFrogMac]

same here, the GUI on this firmware is laggy for me as well (but not always), I don't care as long as the box is working, and it is working just fine otherwise...

So far, I still haven't had lag in the UI after about 2 going on 3 days up with the new firmware. Once things are set for me, I usually don't go into the settings though. Overall, things have been stable. If I encounter problems, I also brought my TP-Link WiFi 6 router with me, or I could take the Panoramic gateway from Cox out of bridge mode for a bit. Hopefully I won't have to as the RT-AX86U seems to be working just fine. Something else I've noticed in the new apartment though is my signal is more consistent. Probably because it's a different physical environment and structure. An example of this is devices such as smart bulbs that would show low signal in the clients list now show full signal here.

 

[AntonK]

same here, the GUI on this firmware is laggy for me as well (but not always), I don't care as long as the box is working, and it is working just fine otherwise...

I factory reset and installed 22068 again and now all is perfect, including the GUI. After a dirty update from 21709 a few weeks ago the GUI seemed almost frozen.

Thanks for all the successful 22068 installs reported here. Gave me the energy to try it again!

 

[iFrogMac]

I upgraded from the release that was out before I left my other apartment the 22nd of November of last year. So maybe that's why I never had the GUI problems. The Router was packed up for about 2 months without use.