Asuswrt-Merlin 3.0.0.4.270.25 is out

[RussellInCincinnati]

are you advising all .24 users to upgrade to .25?

Any guidelines for users of .24 who are not having problems, and are for example satisfied with the (non-lightning speed) Samba performance, and who have a mixture of Windows and Ubuntu file-sharing clients, as to whether or not we should upgrade to .25?

For example, might Ubuntu users notice faster file-sharing off of the ext2-formatted router USB device, with NFS installed and active on the RT-AC66U? Would you even advise Windows 7 (or even Windows XP) users to install NFS file services and switch to NFS from Samba?

Thanks for all your work in any case.

 

[felix]

Thank you

Hi Merlin,

thank you for the effort to produce this improved firmware! This is the first time I installed a non-OEM firmware on my router and everything worked out of the box. I experienced one problem with entware-setup.sh (had to create the asusware directory) but perhaps I had just forgot to reboot after mounting my USB drive.

Cheers!
Felix

 

[rlcronin]

I forgot to reapply a dnsmasq patch that added that option after I updated it to 2.65.

For now do not disable DHCP logging to ensure this option does not get set. I'll try to have a 25b release out sometime during the weekend with the patch reapplied.

For what its worth I was bit by this as well. Reverted to 24 awaiting 25b. Thanks for the quick response.
--
bc

 

[RMerlin]

Any guidelines for users of .24 who are not having problems, and are for example satisfied with the (non-lightning speed) Samba performance, and who have a mixture of Windows and Ubuntu file-sharing clients, as to whether or not we should upgrade to .25?

For example, might Ubuntu users notice faster file-sharing off of the ext2-formatted router USB device, with NFS installed and active on the RT-AC66U? Would you even advise Windows 7 (or even Windows XP) users to install NFS file services and switch to NFS from Samba?

Thanks for all your work in any case.

NFS should give you better performance than SMB, especially if using a Linux client. In a quick test I was able to push it to 17 MB/s, versus the usual 15 MB/s I get with SMB.

No idea what kind of performance impact it would have with a Windows client, as this would depend on how optimized the client is.

 

[RMerlin]

270.25b is being uploaded, with fixes for OpenVPN client routing and DHCP logging.

 

[joegreat]

270.25b is being uploaded, with fixes for OpenVPN client routing and DHCP logging.

Hi,

Thank you for your efforts!
I have already downloaded the new version, but will install it later during the week - with DHCP logging things are running fine on version 25.

With kind regards
Joe

 

[cmillar6]

is it normal for the b not to show up in the firmware version? I flashed twice, and even tried going back to 270.24 and then to 270.25b and my firmware version still shows 3.0.0.4.270.25

 

[joegreat]

is it normal for the b not to show up in the firmware version? I flashed twice, and even tried going back to 270.24 and then to 270.25b and my firmware version still shows 3.0.0.4.270.25

Hi,

Yes, this is normal - the 'b' will not show up.
Was the same with 24b...

With kind regards
Joe

 

[rlcronin]

For what its worth I was bit by this as well. Reverted to 24 awaiting 25b. Thanks for the quick response.
--
bc

Loaded 25b, all is well.
--
bc

 

[D2theZ]

recently switched to Merlin build for the first time; fun stuff and amazing work. I noticed though that once I set my 2.4Ghz radio to 20/40, set primary channel to 6, and extension channel to upper or lower then save; once I revisit the page upper/lower is no longer selectable and all I get is auto as the single option.

Also, log says radio is in 20mhz mode, not 20/40. Is this normal?

 

[cmillar6]

Thanks for patching so quickly Merlin, your work is much appreciated. As soon as I get my bonus at work I'll be donating. Since it appears your gear your efforts towards the home user if your looking for ideas for future builds I would really like to see Parental Controls polished up, they just don't work as they should I suspect it might be ipv6 related.

 

[RMerlin]

recently switched to Merlin build for the first time; fun stuff and amazing work. I noticed though that once I set my 2.4Ghz radio to 20/40, set primary channel to 6, and extension channel to upper or lower then save; once I revisit the page upper/lower is no longer selectable and all I get is auto as the single option.

Also, log says radio is in 20mhz mode, not 20/40. Is this normal?

If it doesn't let you select an extension channel then it's probably because it's back to 20 MHz.

Personally, I recommend against using 40 MHz on the 2.4 GHz band however, unless you have next to no interference, and no cordless phone using the 2.4 GHz band. That band is so crowded that using 40 MHz means you will pretty much overlap as many as 5 channels total - way too easy to be affected by interference.

If performance is what you are after, 5 GHz is the best choice at the moment (so long it's able to adequately cover your area).

 

[RMerlin]

Thanks for patching so quickly Merlin, your work is much appreciated. As soon as I get my bonus at work I'll be donating. Since it appears your gear your efforts towards the home user if your looking for ideas for future builds I would really like to see Parental Controls polished up, they just don't work as they should I suspect it might be ipv6 related.

Parental Control, like QoS, is something I've avoided touching so far:

1) Asus are still regularly making changes to both of them
2) They are both a bit more complex to test - way too easy to make things worse rather than improving it.

That's not saying I won't eventually start digging more into these two, but right now I prefer to stay away from both of them, at least until Asus stabilizes that code. For example I've seen them make extensive architectural changes to the QoS code over the past year on at least two occasions - and the first time they ended up reverting back to the old design as the new one had quite a few drawbacks (I was even replacing it with the old QoS code in my own builds because of these issues).

 

[ryzhov_al]

NFS Export: You can now export USB directories over NFS the same way you can export SMB shares. Go to USB Application -> Servers Center -> NFS Exports to enable this, and export USB directories.

Also, mounting NFS share on router will never been so easy. Thank you, Eric!

admin@RT-N66U:/tmp/home/root# cat /opt/etc/init.d/S01firmware_nfs
#!/bin/sh

prefix="/opt"
PATH=${prefix}/bin:${prefix}/sbin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
        mountPoint=/tmp/mnt/MyBookLive

start() {
        if [ ! -d "$mountPoint" ]; then
                mkdir $mountPoint
        fi
        portmap
        mount -t nfs 192.168.1.2:/nfs/Public $mountPoint
        }

stop() {
        umount $mountPoint
        killall portmap
        }

status() {
        echo "nothing to do..."
        }

case "$1" in
        start)
                start
                ;;
        stop)
                stop
                ;;
        restart)
               stop
               sleep 2
               start
                ;;
        status) status
                ;;
        *)
                echo "Usage: $0 (start|stop|restart|status)"
                exit 1
                ;;
esac

exit 0

Just one caution: too fast copying to NFS share causes router to reboot. Looks like some kernel-related stuff, can't say nothing more without serial console.

 

[Stimpy]

Thank you for 25b Merlin! Fantastic so far. I had wireless problems with 24, and had to go back to 23b. However I'm having a great time with 25b. Only difference I made was disabling the advanced interference protection. So it could have been that which was causing all my wireless devices to randomly disconnect from the network.

I have a request, could you please find a way to enable MTU & MRU settings when you are using Automatic settings in the WAN page. I just cannot get it to work if I choose any other connection type. I would like to set PPoE, like I have done on previous routers, however this router will not connect.

MTU settings are important, and ASUS offer them, but only if your not using automatic settings... Kinda crazy in my book!

Many thanks if you can figure this out!

 

[RMerlin]

I have a request, could you please find a way to enable MTU & MRU settings when you are using Automatic settings in the WAN page. I just cannot get it to work if I choose any other connection type. I would like to set PPoE, like I have done on previous routers, however this router will not connect.

MTU settings are important, and ASUS offer them, but only if your not using automatic settings... Kinda crazy in my book!

Many thanks if you can figure this out!

Generally, PPPoE needs a different MTU because of the overhead. Automatic mode is usually a bridged connection, which means the 1500 bytes MTU is normally what you should be using. If not, something is weird with your ISP IMHO.

I can take a look to see if it's doable.

 

[M.T.Field]

After reading the article about whether or not alternate firmware breaks your router, I decided to switch back from Tomato to Asus - but your Merlin distribution this past weekend. Thus far, things have been very good. I do have one request though - is there a way to remove (or increase) the limit for static DHCP devices from the current cap of 32? Thanks for the excellent additions to the stock Asus distribution.

 

[joegreat]

I do have one request though - is there a way to remove (or increase) the limit for static DHCP devices from the current cap of 32?

Hi,

Your question was already discussed and answered here.
A small search would give you the instant answer...

With kind regards
Joe

 

[roadrnr]

I asked my contact last week, and he didn't have any new info for me yet. However Asus did release a beta version targeted at users having issues with the XBox, which seems to take care of that particular issue.

Does your firmware already address the issue they are having with the Xbox?

 

[toor]

There is still something going on with dhcp. I removed the other hosts, just so that you can see one in the log. Its happening alot.

Note: I removed the mac address, thats why it shows up as c8:60:00REMOVED)

Mar  4 03:44:10 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPINFORM(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)
Mar  4 03:44:10 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPACK(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)Kodiak
Mar  4 03:48:17 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPINFORM(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)
Mar  4 03:48:17 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPACK(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)Kodiak
Mar  4 03:54:13 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPINFORM(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)
Mar  4 03:54:13 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPACK(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)Kodiak
Mar  4 03:58:20 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPINFORM(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)
Mar  4 03:58:20 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPACK(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)Kodiak
Mar  4 04:04:15 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPINFORM(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)
Mar  4 04:04:15 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPACK(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)Kodiak
Mar  4 04:08:22 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPINFORM(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)
Mar  4 04:08:22 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPACK(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)Kodiak
Mar  4 04:12:45 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPINFORM(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)
Mar  4 04:12:45 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPACK(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)Kodiak
Mar  4 04:14:18 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPINFORM(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)
Mar  4 04:14:18 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPACK(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)Kodiak
Mar  4 04:18:25 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPINFORM(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)
Mar  4 04:18:25 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPACK(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)Kodiak
Mar  4 04:24:21 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPINFORM(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)
Mar  4 04:24:21 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPACK(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)Kodiak
Mar  4 04:28:27 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPINFORM(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)
Mar  4 04:28:27 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPACK(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)Kodiak
Mar  4 04:34:23 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPINFORM(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)
Mar  4 04:34:23 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPACK(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)Kodiak
Mar  4 04:38:30 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPINFORM(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)
Mar  4 04:38:30 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPACK(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)Kodiak
Mar  4 04:44:26 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPINFORM(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)
Mar  4 04:44:26 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPACK(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)Kodiak
Mar  4 04:48:33 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPINFORM(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)
Mar  4 04:48:33 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPACK(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)Kodiak
Mar  4 04:54:28 dnsmasq-dhcp[518]: DHCPINFORM(br0) 192.168.1.125 c8:60:00:(REMOVED)