Asuswrt-Merlin 3.0.0.4.354.29 Beta 1

[nobode]

When I flash 29beta1, my ac66u goes into recovery mode with the power light blinking.. I was upgrading from 28beta 1. I had to revert to 28beta1 with the firmware recovery utility to get the router to work again. I tried upgrading about 3 times and the router always goes to recovery mode. Should I try resetting the router to factory defaults and trying again? or just wait for the next version? very strange

Occasionally I came up with the same problem. After a firmware upgrade from WebUI, the router restarted itself, then the PWR led kept blinking just like in recovery mode. But it was not recovery mode because the ASUS recovery utility couldn't communicate with the router.

If unplug the power cord, wait for some 10 seconds, and replug-in, there's a high probability that the PWR led be off, only the LAN leds are lit. The router would be brick at the time, even pressing reset before power up doesn't work.

My solution, so far always works, is to unplug the power, wait for some 10 minutes, then press the reset button and plug the power back in. Then use ASUS recovery utility to upload firmware, which could be either old or new in version. And it's better to give the PC a static IP like 192.168.1.2 before using recovery utility.

I guess it may be safer to restore to factory default BEFORE and AFTER a firmware upgrading, like people do with dd-wrt. This method solved my weird WAN DNS manually setting not working problem.

 

[mbtsm]

hi merlin
the beta 29
after 30 minute disconnect wireless 2.4 and 5
and back again
all time after 30 minute

 

[Jettubby]

Hi Merlin. Again many many many thanks for the firmware. Just curious why the issue with the N66U? Has Asus given up on this device and not providing you with stable wireless updates to create an updated firmware. I've tried the 27-29betas and still an issue with the wireless. I'm running 26 which is much better but would still like to see some wireless updated performance. Man I should have spent the extra $30 and gotten the AC version.

Do you anticipate an updated version that "will" work with the N66U in the future? Again thanks. Not complaining but just curious.

 

[RMerlin]

Did those bug only affect single devices, or also the traffic from/to the internet?


I would like to export the traffic data. Since the files are binary - can you guide me which file in the sources code read the data?

The fixes were specific to the Per IP traffic monitoring feature, regular traffic monitoring was unaffected.

The data files are created by cstats (Per IP) and rstats (global).

 

[RMerlin]

Hi Merlin. Again many many many thanks for the firmware. Just curious why the issue with the N66U? Has Asus given up on this device and not providing you with stable wireless updates to create an updated firmware. I've tried the 27-29betas and still an issue with the wireless. I'm running 26 which is much better but would still like to see some wireless updated performance. Man I should have spent the extra $30 and gotten the AC version.

Do you anticipate an updated version that "will" work with the N66U in the future? Again thanks. Not complaining but just curious.

Considering how serious the issue is, I'm sure Asus will eventually fix it. No idea when that might happen however. With Computex just around the corner and some new routers under development (I think at least one of them is supposed to be shown at Computex based on what was posted elsewhere), I have a feeling their devs are focusing on getting these new models ready for Computex.

For them the RT-N66 fix probably isn't urgent, since they did label that release as "Beta". It affects Asuswrt-Merlin users more due to the large number of features/fixes being added in the mean time, making 270.26b least and least attractive to run with every new release.

 

[RMerlin]

My rt-n66u has been rebooting when under network traffic. So, I ssh'd in and tried to monitor the syslog.log while doing the following...

1. Write to a usb disk via samba network share
2. Download 5 4gb torrents

Eventually, I was able to get the following...

Is this enough info to diagnose anything? Is there anything else that I can provide that can help to isolate why my router is crashing?

Using a network share isn't 100% stable. I can easily reproduce the issue with NFS, however I have been unable to figure out the cause of the problem. All I know is it's related to the kernel, and this kernel is so old and patched to Hell and back that it's next to impossible to figure out those kind of issues. Frankenkernel has patches from a whole range of kernels between 2.6.22 and 3.8...

 

[RMerlin]

I'm seeing the same thing under FF21

This is a regression. I had fixed that issue months ago. In 354 I saw Asus did a few fixes to that page, so I assumed they took care of that issue, and reverted my own fix. Looks like they didn't, I'll have to reapply my own fix.

 

[NeutralGold]

I have found a little display bug on the Guest network page. I normally have 5ghz turned off since I have no 5ghz devices. I noticed this right after installing the latest beta firmware.

I'm using an RT-N66U with Firefox 20.0.1.

Thanks and good work as usual Merlin!

Firefox decided to update when I checked the about page to see which version it was.
It is now version 21. Bug is still there.

 

[RMerlin]

When I flash 29beta1, my ac66u goes into recovery mode with the power light blinking.. I was upgrading from 28beta 1. I had to revert to 28beta1 with the firmware recovery utility to get the router to work again. I tried upgrading about 3 times and the router always goes to recovery mode. Should I try resetting the router to factory defaults and trying again? or just wait for the next version? very strange

My RT-AC66U has always been more picky with flashing than my RT-N66U for some reason. Most of the time the RT-AC66U will require a manual power cycle to complete the flash - my RT-N66U that got flashed close to a hundred times never did.

There was also that issue of a small number of RT-AC66U being shipped with non-working firmware too. I have a feeling the NAND driver used in the RT-AC66U isn't 100% working.

 

[HTMLSpinnr]

Two bugs in 29 Beta 1

Seeing a couple of "bugs" after updating to 29 Beta 1 on my N66U.

First "bug" (this could be upstream and I believe I may have seen it in previous versions as well): If Download Master is "installed" but disabled (I just want the binaries for ipkg), it seems that transmission, amuled, snarfmaster, and nzbget are started at boot, despite the disabled state. I can verify that the WebUI shows Download Master as disabled. Enabling and disabling will result in additional processes being started for enable, then all dm2 processes being stopped upon disable. Looking through the startup script in init.d, there's no provision to detect any sort of nvram setting.

Second "bug" - the new channel on hover is somewhat inaccurate. In 40MHz mode, the incorrect secondary channel is being displayed - at least for for 5GHz. In my case, my router is auto-selecting 194 + 1, and 149 + 151 is being shown. It should be 149+153, or just shown as 149 +1. In other words, control channel +1 or -1 should use the nearest whole channel, whereas the router is showing the aggregate channel centerline frequency equivalent.

 

[Jettubby]

Thanks for the response. So far 26b is working well so I'll be happy with that until something else comes out or I find an A/C model at a great price! ;-)

Considering how serious the issue is, I'm sure Asus will eventually fix it. No idea when that might happen however. With Computex just around the corner and some new routers under development (I think at least one of them is supposed to be shown at Computex based on what was posted elsewhere), I have a feeling their devs are focusing on getting these new models ready for Computex.

For them the RT-N66 fix probably isn't urgent, since they did label that release as "Beta". It affects Asuswrt-Merlin users more due to the large number of features/fixes being added in the mean time, making 270.26b least and least attractive to run with every new release.

 

[RMerlin]

Second "bug" - the new channel on hover is somewhat inaccurate. In 40MHz mode, the incorrect secondary channel is being displayed - at least for for 5GHz. In my case, my router is auto-selecting 194 + 1, and 149 + 151 is being shown. It should be 149+153, or just shown as 149 +1. In other words, control channel +1 or -1 should use the nearest whole channel, whereas the router is showing the aggregate channel centerline frequency equivalent.

The value is obtained from the wireless driver, so it should be accurate unless there's a bug in the wireless driver itself.

 

[spawn026]

ntfs worked

Just wanted to give my experience with this firmware. I have 3 3tb hdd and 1 500gig drive in a mediasonic probox 4 bay enclosure all ntfs. The only thing I got was unable to mount on first try notices. Then I fired up ubuntu and saw that the drives were still being held under windows. I went back in windows and unmounted all of them and bam, all 4 were being read under network place (samba). If anyone else is checking their drives under windows before attaching it to the router you may want to unmount it and give it another shot.

 

[neil0311]

You don't need to reset to factory defaults if coming from another 354-based build. I recommend you do so if coming from a 270 (or older) based build however due to the changes in default settings in 354.

Is it OK to back up in .270, load .354, reset to default, and then restore from the backup done with the older version? Or, is it necessary to re-enter everything manually after reset?

 

[Soul--Reaver]

Thanks RMerlin

I especially appreciate the fix for DMZ as i use it quite a lot

 

[RMerlin]

Is it OK to back up in .270, load .354, reset to default, and then restore from the backup done with the older version? Or, is it necessary to re-enter everything manually after reset?

Restoring a backup rewrites exactly the same values that were there before, so it ends up doing the same thing as if you hadn't reset at all.

 

[SjoerdNLD]

Hi Merlin, Thx for your efforts, running on my AC66U w/o problems.
Do you know a way to enable logging on the ipv6 dhcpclient?

 

[neil0311]

Restoring a backup rewrites exactly the same values that were there before, so it ends up doing the same thing as if you hadn't reset at all.

What I thought. So to update beyond .270, you recommend a reset and manually re-entering all settings.

 

[DaveMishSr]

What I thought. So to update beyond .270, you recommend a reset and manually re-entering all settings.

The first time you flash build 354 you should reset the router to factory defaults and then reboot. After that you must MANUALLY re-enter all of your router's settings. Do NOT use a configuration file to restore your settings.

 

[rlcronin]

The first time you flash build 354 you should reset the router to factory defaults and then reboot. After that you must MANUALLY re-enter all of your router's settings. Do NOT use a configuration file to restore your settings.

I've often wondered, how do you go about remembering what all the settings you made were? Is there a tool to look at a configuration file and produce a text file listing them all? Or what?
--
bc