Howdy folks,
3.0.0.4.354.29 Beta 1 has just been released. Due to the numerous changes and to avoid confusion over which version people ahve flashed, the version number got bumped to 354.29.
There is unfortunately still no resolution for the RT-N66U wireless driver, however that didn't prevent me from spending a lot of time and efforts in fixing other issues over which I do have control
The first area that saw a lot of debugging done was for ISPs that use a VPN tunnel (such as Beeline). 354.28 Beta introduced a bug that prevent it from being able to resolve the VPN server's hostname, so the tunnel was unable to establish a connection, unless you were using its IP. There was also another bug related to the router's behaviour when the connection went down - Asuswrt's web redirection would kick in, preventing the VPN client from being able to resolve the tunnel's hostname to reconnect (webredirect would resolve any host to 10.0.0.1). This version should be the most reliable build to date for those VPN-based ISPs.
The other area that saw a lot of work was the Per IP traffic monitoring. I was finally able to reproduce various scenarios that would cause traffic to be incorrectly counted. One was if you transferred a large amount of data, causing it to grow larger than the 32-bit values that were being used. Those have now been switched to 64-bit. There was also another scenario that would occur if the cstats daemon was asked for a traffic update earlier than expected, which would cause a bunch of traffic to be counted twice. In my tests on this one, a 5 GB transfer was ending up accounting for 30 GB of traffic when I would asked for 3-4 updates during that transfer.
Also, the weird bug where checking the option to recreate the traffic monitoring data files would have them recreated again after the next reboot fixed (turns out the flag was cleared in memory but the cleared flag wasn't being written back to the flashed nvram).
Note that there will still be a slight difference between total traffic and Per IP traffic. From what I can see this is normal - the difference percentage remained constant during my tests. This is most likely overhead network traffic that either never reaches the target computer, or is regular TCP/IP overhead.
Various fixes and improvements were also done to the new Site Survey, based on user feedback.
Yet another fix for USB disks > 2 TB was implemented (this one was backported from Linux 3.8 by Padavan). This fix did resolve compatibility issues with my own NexStar enclosure. HOWEVER, you might need to use ext2/ext3. The NTFS driver was unable to properly replay the journal on my 3 TB HDD, preventing it from mounting - ext3 worked fine.
Finally, the RT-N16 is now officially fully supported, thanks to a donated RT-N16. A couple of bugs specific to the RT-N16 have been fixed.
Downloads are on Mediafire for all three firmwares, in the Beta folders. The Experimental builds will be released later tonight once they are ready.
Please check the Changelog for the full list of changes.
What needs testing in this new beta? These are the areas I'm most intereted in hearing about:
Coming next, the plan is to hope for a fixed RT-N66U driver in the near future (I have no ETA on that one, sorry). In the mean time feature development will be mostly frozen, and I will mostly focus on bug fixes. The goal is to ensure that the first release that will come with the new wireless driver will be as stable as possible, before starting to look into other potential feature changes.
Thanks everyone for your interest in this project!
3.0.0.4.354.29 Beta 1 has just been released. Due to the numerous changes and to avoid confusion over which version people ahve flashed, the version number got bumped to 354.29.
There is unfortunately still no resolution for the RT-N66U wireless driver, however that didn't prevent me from spending a lot of time and efforts in fixing other issues over which I do have control
The first area that saw a lot of debugging done was for ISPs that use a VPN tunnel (such as Beeline). 354.28 Beta introduced a bug that prevent it from being able to resolve the VPN server's hostname, so the tunnel was unable to establish a connection, unless you were using its IP. There was also another bug related to the router's behaviour when the connection went down - Asuswrt's web redirection would kick in, preventing the VPN client from being able to resolve the tunnel's hostname to reconnect (webredirect would resolve any host to 10.0.0.1). This version should be the most reliable build to date for those VPN-based ISPs.
The other area that saw a lot of work was the Per IP traffic monitoring. I was finally able to reproduce various scenarios that would cause traffic to be incorrectly counted. One was if you transferred a large amount of data, causing it to grow larger than the 32-bit values that were being used. Those have now been switched to 64-bit. There was also another scenario that would occur if the cstats daemon was asked for a traffic update earlier than expected, which would cause a bunch of traffic to be counted twice. In my tests on this one, a 5 GB transfer was ending up accounting for 30 GB of traffic when I would asked for 3-4 updates during that transfer.
Also, the weird bug where checking the option to recreate the traffic monitoring data files would have them recreated again after the next reboot fixed (turns out the flag was cleared in memory but the cleared flag wasn't being written back to the flashed nvram).
Note that there will still be a slight difference between total traffic and Per IP traffic. From what I can see this is normal - the difference percentage remained constant during my tests. This is most likely overhead network traffic that either never reaches the target computer, or is regular TCP/IP overhead.
Various fixes and improvements were also done to the new Site Survey, based on user feedback.
Yet another fix for USB disks > 2 TB was implemented (this one was backported from Linux 3.8 by Padavan). This fix did resolve compatibility issues with my own NexStar enclosure. HOWEVER, you might need to use ext2/ext3. The NTFS driver was unable to properly replay the journal on my 3 TB HDD, preventing it from mounting - ext3 worked fine.
Finally, the RT-N16 is now officially fully supported, thanks to a donated RT-N16. A couple of bugs specific to the RT-N16 have been fixed.
Downloads are on Mediafire for all three firmwares, in the Beta folders. The Experimental builds will be released later tonight once they are ready.
Please check the Changelog for the full list of changes.
What needs testing in this new beta? These are the areas I'm most intereted in hearing about:
- 3 TB HDD support, especially if your disk didn't work previously - does it work now? Again, make sure it's formatted in ext3 first.
- VPN-based ISP users such as Beeline users - are the reconnection issues also resolved now?
- Traffic monitoring: if you still see major errors in accounting, I'm interested in hearing about it, especially if you can find a way to reproduce the problem.
- miniupnpd and dropbear (SSH) were both updated - please make sure nothing broke in the process.
Coming next, the plan is to hope for a fixed RT-N66U driver in the near future (I have no ETA on that one, sorry). In the mean time feature development will be mostly frozen, and I will mostly focus on bug fixes. The goal is to ensure that the first release that will come with the new wireless driver will be as stable as possible, before starting to look into other potential feature changes.
Thanks everyone for your interest in this project!
