Asuswrt-Merlin 3.0.0.4.374.34 is out

[zOlid]

I couldnt get IPTV and internet working simultabneously at all, on newer releases than 374.32.
Tried SDK5 and SDK6 builds fom my RT-N66U, absolutely no difference, so staying on the last build that worked.



http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showthread.php?t=11504

Probably a bug, but Traffic Monitor is low priority even for Asus.

Try what I did.
I posted the "solution" on a swedish forum where others had the same issue, and it seems to work for them also.
In short:
Get your router in to recovery mode and load the oldest firmware you can find on the ASUS website, with the recovery tool.
When its done do a factory reset.
After that you do ALL your settings, and i really mean ALL, including the IPTV settings. After your done with this check that all is working as it should.
It may be possible to load a settings save here, but i have not tried. At least i know it works if you don't.
After that you download the latest ASUS firmware trough the router. (may work to download manually also, I'm not sure)
If you want to stay on ASUS stock you just stop here, and everything should work as it should, but as soon as you do some changes, the IPTV and internet won't work together. So just make sure you fix everything before you load the latest firmware.

If you want merlins firmware, you just load merlins firmware after you have installed the latest ASUS one.
It may be possible to skip loading the latest ASUS firmware before you load Merlin. Im not sure.

I too find Stock to be faster and more stable with my AC56U and Intel 7260....I used Melrins last release (33) for a while, but throughput decreased over a few days. I flashed back to stock and things have been great. (Except that the printer seems to go offline after a day or 2 and I have to reboot router to get it to print, but I see that is a common issues with many Asus routers)

The Intel 7260 is known for some driver issues...seems to get along much better with stock asus firmware

Maybe it is just my hardware....i did successfully have my AC56u overclocked to 1ghz and 800mhz ram....but did notice stability issues. Routing performance did not increase at all, in fact, it seem to get worse.....and webpages failed to load sometimes....set back to stock speeds and all was normal.

Yeah I know the 7260 have some issues.
But I had the same problem on my spankin new rMBP.
So it can't be the 7260 on my HTPC that is the issue.
After i loaded latest stock firmware, every thing works great on both the rMBP and the HTPC, at least so far.
I get around 50-55 Megabyte/s when i transfer from my NAS, and my full internet speed of 100mbit when i use my rMBP. And that is kind of amazing
On my HTPC i get 20-30 Megabytes/s from my NAS, and 100Mbit over the internet. Its not as fast as the rMBP but its still a far stretch from 3 Megabytes/s I currently have if i run Merlins firmware. :/

I really want to run Merlins firmware tho, so would be awesome to find out what the issue is.

 

[Etz]

Get your router in to recovery mode and load the oldest firmware you can find on the ASUS website, with the recovery tool.
When its done do a factory reset.

Older than Asus Official 3.0.0.4.354.x wont work either, tested...
If I remember correctly there was somekind of IGMP or Multicast issue that got fixed back then.

Well I could always try your solution, but still...
I would prefer to know why it broke in a first place and get it working in usual way.

 

[zOlid]

Older than Asus Official 3.0.0.4.354.x wont work either, tested...
If I remember correctly there was somekind of IGMP or Multicast issue that got fixed back then.

Well I could always try your solution, but still...
I would prefer to know why it broke in a first place and get it working in usual way.

Yeah I know, reverting back to older don't work either.
You need to do the full procedure I'm afraid :/
I rather fix it also, but this is a fix until it does.

And at least when your done with it, your running the latest firmware and everything working.
As long as you don't do any settings after you load it, that is.

 

[CyberMew]

Maybe this means probably some config are left behind but not created in new firmwares, yet they are being read.

 

[Etz]

Maybe this means probably some config are left behind but not created in new firmwares, yet they are being read.

I dont think so, as I cleared nvram after issue occured and tried to start with clean config on the same firmware.
I also cleared nvram, beetween testing different SDK`s.

Absolutely no change, issue still persists couldnt get it work.

Flashed older 374.32 build again, cleared nvram, did IPTV config and it works out of the box no issues whatsoever.

 

[speedingcheetah]

Torrents crash router

woa...serious issues here...

I updated my AC56U to the new firmware on the website: ASUS RT-AC56U Firmware version 3.0.0.4.374.291

I was using it fine for about an hour....speeds best they have ever been transferring files around both on wifi an lan....up-link speeds were much improved for the 5ghz wifi...

However, soon a a launched a torrent...everything fell apart. The network crashed...no internet connection...did have local lan access....BUT the routers web config page would not load....

I power cycled the router...and same thing...works great, until torrent is launched. After 4 of these power cycles, I decided to downgrade firmware, but the router was not accepting my login info...it took 2 more power cycles..then it logged in and I downgraded firmware( flashed FW_RT_AC56U_3004374134.trx....then updated via the UI to 3.0.0.4.374_158)

Now its working fine again...torrents and everything....what Asus do to screw up the new firmware?

Edit: O...i see a thread for this firmware version already posted....but thought I would mention it here...as it may affect Merlin firmware to.

 

[savagehenry]

No. None of the changes in 291 are integrated yet, due to the large amount of changes involved. It will take me a few weeks to work on that.

Will you be able to port the time machine code over to the RT-N66x, that would be a great feature for us mhacintosh (yes I meant to spell it that way) users.

 

[RMerlin]

My feeling is that this new version mainly affects newer routers like AC68 and has almost no or little improvements for the old good RT-N66U. Am I wrong?

See the complete changelog. There are a number of changes that affect all routers. Master Browser not working unless you have a USB disk plugged in, missing pages on the Traffic Monitoring sections, etc...

 

[RMerlin]

I am correct in assuming this version is also still using the newer and slower wireless drivers?

Which router are you talking about? They all use different drivers.

 

[RMerlin]

yes ,but hw accel is enabled on asus fw and your fw so that wouldn't be a
factor

the 291 and 235 also crashed the same way
so their must be something different inthe changes on your fw compared to asus's

could it be that yours has loopback enabled and their's doesn't

Please re-read the original post. This firmware is not based on 291, so it's normal that any crashing issues in 235 would also occur in this release.

 

[RMerlin]

I too find Stock to be faster and more stable with my AC56U and Intel 7260....I used Melrins last release (33) for a while, but throughput decreased over a few days. I flashed back to stock and things have been great.

The driver I am using in the AC56U is the same driver as in stock 205, so wireless performance should be identical.

I haven't experienced any wireless performance issue here with my AC56U and a Centrino 6230 (the AC56U is my main router at home), it could be either environment-specific, or client-specific. For instance if you have channels set to Auto, your router might be using different channels when switching between FW versions, which could explain the change in performance. It's always best to use a fixed channel for better stability.

 

[RMerlin]

Will you be able to port the time machine code over to the RT-N66x, that would be a great feature for us mhacintosh (yes I meant to spell it that way) users.

Only if Asus does. Time Machine requires a different version of the ufsd closed-source driver that supports HFS+, so if Asus doesn't switch to that new version on the MIPS-based routers (N16/N66/AC66) then there is nothing I can do about it, sorry.

Shouldn't be a problem for the AC56 however, as it's ARM-based just like the AC68.

 

[speedingcheetah]

The driver I am using in the AC56U is the same driver as in stock 205, so wireless performance should be identical.

I haven't experienced any wireless performance issue here with my AC56U and a Centrino 6230 (the AC56U is my main router at home), it could be either environment-specific, or client-specific. For instance if you have channels set to Auto, your router might be using different channels when switching between FW versions, which could explain the change in performance. It's always best to use a fixed channel for better stability.

Chanel is fixed at 149 80mhz...

and yea...i have a different wifi card than u...the 6230 is an N card...not AC.

 

[RMerlin]

Maybe this means probably some config are left behind but not created in new firmwares, yet they are being read.

If doing this procedure does resolve the issue, then it means a default setting is different between both firmwares. The factory default reset applies the default value of the old FW, which remains there when you upgrade to a newer firmware.

I would recommend comparing the nvram settings related to vlan or IGMP after a factory default reset on that old firmware. If you can isolate it, then it would be just setting to manually adjust rather than having to go through the whole procedure.

 

[RMerlin]

Chanel is fixed at 169 80mhz...

and yea...i have a different wifi card than u...the 6230 is an N card...not AC.

169 sounds quite high as a channel - I don't think all regions support it. Try using a lower number (like 155) just to see what happens.

 

[RMerlin]

EDIT: According to this article I need to add 28 for protocol overhead. 1472 + 28 = 1500. So I should leave it at 1500 then?


And a related MTU issue:
Most of my traffic is via the WAN connection, not so much LAN traffic. I have enabled jumbo frames in the router and in my desktop and laptop NIC drivers and I have one additional switch on my LAN that supports jumbo frames so everything works fine with jumbo frames enabled, but I'm not sure if it's advisable/smart to continue this way. I've read they can give higher ping and that the saved CPU cycles are a non-issue these days anyway.

Should I:
a) Keep using jumbo frames since they seem to work OK.
b) Turn jumbo frames off in the router and switch my NICs back to default 1500 MTU?
c) Turn jumbo frames off in the router and switch my NICs to the WAN MTU (possibly 1472 or 1500 depending on the answer to my first question).

Based on my limited understanding my gut tells me that I may be better off switching to c, since most of my traffic is internet based and the router would not need to fragment the packets?

In general, it's best to leave everything at the default value of 1500 (unless using PPPoE, in which case the common default is 1492). While you might scrape some performance boost by using Jumbo Frames, the headache it brings just isn't worth the trouble. I used it for a few weeks at home, and ended up reverting to the default 1500 MTU. Otherwise, you might waste a lot of time troubleshooting network issues whenever you add a new device to your network. Some NIC configurations aren't clear either if Frame Size of 8K means 8000 or 8192 bytes. Mistmatched MTUs will have a serious negative impact on performance.

I added the WAN setting just because some people wanted to fiddle with it. The option was already in the FW, it wast just a matter of exposing them to the webui. But very few users will actually benefit from changing this from 1500.

And before someone asks: I don't support oversized packets on PPPoE, as it requires patching to be supported by rp-pppoe. Not willing to risk introducing regressions by this.

 

[RogerSC]

I really appreciate that you're carrying forward the SDK5 versions, since those of us with RT-N66U's that use wireless would otherwise not be able to take advantage of the newer bug fixes and features.

Thank you very much!

 

[speedingcheetah]

169 sounds quite high as a channel - I don't think all regions support it. Try using a lower number (like 155) just to see what happens.

oops...meant 149...Primary channel...and there is no option for 155...

setting the channel to anything other than 36 or 149...it uses 40mhz mode..somehting to do with how the channels are utilized....

Anyway...i already did extensive testing with all the channels...and 149 with power set to 100mw...seems optimal to me.

 

[jerry6]

Seems good AC66 , So far highest transfer speeds yet on 5 ghz band , between 7-9 MBPS , best before was 4-5 MBPS with FW 274.32-beta3 . Just hope it lasts

 

[Anders]

Mine kept rebooting, so I went back to 33.

Did not do a hard-reset before update, since it has worked before.

Maybe its just me