Asuswrt-Merlin 378.51 is out

[RMerlin]

However, there are two ways: to fix the wireless log page or to prevent users from using an apostrophe in SSID (not good).
Used an apostrophe in my SSID for years and years on different routers but had not any stability problems related on SSID name.

If the newest router causes stability problems with apostrophe when older models don't - maybe we should wait for Asus to fix this for ONE model, but not disable this for older devices.

I changed the client array to use " " instead of ' '. It will now cause an issue for anyone using " " in their SSIDs, but since it's less likely to happen than with single quotes, I felt it was worth the change.

If some client devices have problems with apostrophe in ssid name - so those are bad devices and they have to be thrown out of window.

Or, people will spend weeks trying to figure out why their device can't correct, blame everything on their network, spend a lot of time on the forums, for something that could be fixed in just a few minutes by using a more standard SSID.

The problem is that, initially, the 802.11 standards didn't clearly specify what was a legal character and what wasn't in an SSID, so everyone started interpreting it their way. The simplest solution is simply to avoid being overly creative, and sticking to a simple alphanumerical SSID.

 

[mtrains]

Hm, when I returned home from a weekend trip my AC66U router was still broadcasting the 2.4 (and 5) GHz band, but this time it had lost all wired connections until router reboot...

I had the same issue on my AC68R. It happened twice last weekend. The only activity I had going at both times was a torrent download through a wired connection on one laptop and a YouTube video being viewed on another laptop (wireless).

It happened to me once on 378.50_ta last week also, again when a torrent download was going on. So I don't think it is specific to 378.51, but likely started in 378.50 since I had never had this problem before 378.50.

 

[dlandon]

I changed the client array to use " " instead of ' '. It will now cause an issue for anyone using " " in their SSIDs, but since it's less likely to happen than with single quotes, I felt it was worth the change.



Or, people will spend weeks trying to figure out why their device can't correct, blame everything on their network, spend a lot of time on the forums, for something that could be fixed in just a few minutes by using a more standard SSID.

The problem is that, initially, the 802.11 standards didn't clearly specify what was a legal character and what wasn't in an SSID, so everyone started interpreting it their way. The simplest solution is simply to avoid being overly creative, and sticking to a simple alphanumerical SSID.

Wouldn't a ''' do the job? That's three '.

 

[RMerlin]

Wouldn't a ''' do the job? That's three '.

This is Javascript code that's generated by C code.

 

[Marsi4eg]

The problem is that, initially, the 802.11 standards didn't clearly specify what was a legal character and what wasn't in an SSID, so everyone started interpreting it their way. The simplest solution is simply to avoid being overly creative, and sticking to a simple alphanumerical SSID.

I work at the ISP support and I remember some cases when SSID names caused problems with connectivity. But all those cases were cyrillic characters written as SSID and the customers' routers were TP-Links 740N.

Anyway thank you for fixing this again here.

 

[VANT]

i confirm this. I also have ?? for Rx Rate

66u
strange....i only change "DST time zone changes starts" and "[URL='http://www.snbforums.com/javascript:void(0);']DST time zone changes ends" (becouse is have wrong set) and now i see Rx value.

[/URL]

 

[john9527]

As a guest I router then I switched on the 5 GHz frequency but the entry still remains

RT-AC68U , Firmware:378.51

View attachment 3428

Yes, but it has a connect time of 00:00:00 and is no longer Associated

 

[PoloNes]

Thank you very much.


Enviado do meu iPad Mini retina usando Tapatalk

 

[VANT]

in this topic
http://www.snbforums.com/threads/asuswrt-merlin-378-50-is-out.22627/page-20#post-166474
i start report strange problem. Then i think that the source of problem is my USB3.0 HDD Seagate Portable 1TB, becouse without HDD router work ok.

But now i back to this case becouse i test OFW 378_4376, and on this fw router work ok, without this bug. So this problem occur only on RMerlin FW.

For accuracy
378-51
i do factory default, set isp config (full default: ip, dhcp etc), connect HDD, and work ok. After restart internet not work only on pc/laptop connected by wifi or lan (on router i can ping sites form router menu).
Pressing Apply in WAN Menu (without any changes) Internet start working

378-4376
this same config (all the same), internet work after restart without any problem

 

[Sean]

Upgraded to latest Merlin FW (378-51/AC68R). I always do a factory reset after a FW upgrade and then proceed to setup the router as I always do. At the end of setup I decided to check out the newly added Traffic Annalyzer - it's essentially inaccessible for me. It lets me view the page, but if I click on anything I get booted from the router config and it doesn't let me log back in until I physically turn the router on and off. I'm staying clear of it for now I suppose.... App analysis under QoS also shows "General" for every device. Even after running the commands that Merlin posted earlier in the thread I was only able to see apps, but the traffic stayed in the "General" app and after an eventual reboot the apps disappeared altogether. Just wanted to mention what I've experienced thus far.

 

[dpeterson]

I just updated from an RT-N16 to a 87R. installed the .51 here. Router is great but one issue is the DLNA media server stops responding after a bit. If I reboot or toggle DLNA off and back on it comes back up. Any suggestions?

Forgot to add I put Entware-Arm on and Debian with transmission.

 

[raven-au]

The firmware restoration tool is only designed to reflash the content of the linux partition (and its subsequent rootfs partition). It does not touch the brcmnand partition.

Copying the partition from the AC66 to AC87 will indeed result in endianness problems, as the partition signature will be inverted. Best you rely on "tar" to archive and trasnfer the content rather than "dd".

LOL, it's a fun place round here.

I think you misunderstand what's happened to my jffs partition.
The partition is still present and looks ok but it no longer contains a jffs2 file system so tar won't work, not that I actually care about what the contents were,

Also, the mtd-erase2 explicitly doesn't allow erasing the brcmnand partition and there's no mkfs.jffs2 in the install.
Clearly I can't install any system that relies on the jffs2 file system being functional so I can't get hold of utilities that way.
So it appears it isn't possible to recover from this using the stock or Merlin firmware.

I'd rather not install DD-WRT although it might have one or other utilities I could use to make a new jffs2 file system. I guess that's one possible next step.

But this still leads back to the question of whether selecting reformat would work if the mtd-erase2 (entry point of the rc utility) allowed erasing the brcmnand partition?

IOW is it worth me working out how to build asuswrt-merlin and adding a change to allow mtd-erase2 to erase the brcmnand partition?

Anyway, the exercise has been instructive, since OpenWRT clearly needs to be fixed in this respect, but then it doesn't even boot all the way to a prompt yet either, LOL.

 

[raven-au]

Anyway, the exercise has been instructive, since OpenWRT clearly needs to be fixed in this respect, but then it doesn't even boot all the way to a prompt yet either, LOL.

Mmm ... indeed, I wonder if my asus partition went the same way as the jffs partition?
Maybe that's why the Firmware Restoration utility choked when I tried to use it.

I wonder if the asus partition holds device unique information like serial number or if it contains generic model info. and the like, so that a dd copy could be used to restore it.

Lesson learned, always make a backup of all mtd partitions before playing around!!

 

[RMerlin]

Upgraded to latest Merlin FW (378-51/AC68R). I always do a factory reset after a FW upgrade and then proceed to setup the router as I always do. At the end of setup I decided to check out the newly added Traffic Annalyzer - it's essentially inaccessible for me. It lets me view the page, but if I click on anything I get booted from the router config and it doesn't let me log back in until I physically turn the router on and off. I'm staying clear of it for now I suppose.... App analysis under QoS also shows "General" for every device. Even after running the commands that Merlin posted earlier in the thread I was only able to see apps, but the traffic stayed in the "General" app and after an eventual reboot the apps disappeared altogether. Just wanted to mention what I've experienced thus far.

Both issues and their fixes are posted in this very thread.

 

[RMerlin]

LOL, it's a fun place round here.

I think you misunderstand what's happened to my jffs partition.
The partition is still present and looks ok but it no longer contains a jffs2 file system so tar won't work, not that I actually care about what the contents were,

Also, the mtd-erase2 explicitly doesn't allow erasing the brcmnand partition and there's no mkfs.jffs2 in the install.
Clearly I can't install any system that relies on the jffs2 file system being functional so I can't get hold of utilities that way.
So it appears it isn't possible to recover from this using the stock or Merlin firmware.

I'd rather not install DD-WRT although it might have one or other utilities I could use to make a new jffs2 file system. I guess that's one possible next step.

But this still leads back to the question of whether selecting reformat would work if the mtd-erase2 (entry point of the rc utility) allowed erasing the brcmnand partition?

IOW is it worth me working out how to build asuswrt-merlin and adding a change to allow mtd-erase2 to erase the brcmnand partition?

Anyway, the exercise has been instructive, since OpenWRT clearly needs to be fixed in this respect, but then it doesn't even boot all the way to a prompt yet either, LOL.

Try setting the erase flag through nvram. Over SSH:

nvram set jffs2_format=1
nvram set jffs2_on=1
nvram commit
reboot

That will instruct the firmware to erase it at boot time, and afterward to mount it.

 

[RMerlin]

I just updated from an RT-N16 to a 87R. installed the .51 here. Router is great but one issue is the DLNA media server stops responding after a bit. If I reboot or toggle DLNA off and back on it comes back up. Any suggestions?

Forgot to add I put Entware-Arm on and Debian with transmission.

Either running out of RAM (running all of this on a router with 256 MB of RAM is asking a bit too much), or minidlna is running into a corrupted media file causing it to crash.

 

[RMerlin]

thx for new relase.
RT-n66u
in wifi tab, wpa key is visible by default, but i think it should be hide ?

It was accidentally reverted in early February, I've re-added the change to the repo.

 

[rickygao]

I just noticed Traffic Monitor become inaccurate in daily and monthly view
realtime and last 24 hours looks good, but the daily and monthly view shows much less data has been used, always 0.xx GB

 

[raven-au]

Try setting the erase flag through nvram. Over SSH:

nvram set jffs2_format=1
nvram set jffs2_on=1
nvram commit
reboot

That will instruct the firmware to erase it at boot time, and afterward to mount it.

I don't think that will work.

Given there aren't any user space utilities I'm guessing the kernel is expected to do this but it looks like the kernel code won't touch anything that looks corrupt so I think it has to be corrected manually.

However, it also looks like (although I'm not sure) the kernel will be happy to do it if it looks like it's been erased, whether that's all F's or all 0's I'm not sure, and I don't know if the mtd-erase2 leaves block headers in place and erases the block contents, again a user space manual file system create might help.

Or maybe a dd of a copy of an empty jffs2 partition,

 

[RMerlin]

Have an RT-N66U and have IPV6 configured using 6rd through AT&T. All works fine until Parental Controls are enabled. When enabled, IPV6 is still assigned to the router, the clients have an address, but none of the clients show up in the IPv6 LAN Devices List in the system log, and nothing gets passed to the internet. I'm guessing the problem is something with the IPTables that is changed when the Parental Controls time adjustments are made, but not sure where to look for the cure.

(RT-N66U, 378.51)

The 378_xxxx codebase isn't fully compatible with the older MIPS routers at this time. A lot of things related to the firewall are flat out broken, especially when IPv6 is enabled. That would explain why Asus is still releasing firmwares in the 376_xxxx code branch for the RT-N66/RTAC66.

So for now, keyword filtering and parental control are broken on the N66 and AC66, and there's no simple solution in sight.

EDIT: parental control was actually broken even before the switch to 378, as it's also failing to apply the firewall rules in 376.49.

EDIT2: This is also still broken in Asus's 376_3861 own FW, so the problem isn't with my code. I sent a bug report to Asus so hopefully they can eventually resolve it.