The avahi daemon on ASUSWRT by Merlin v378.56-2 has elected to consume all of the processing power of one of the CPUs on my Asus RT-AC56U router, and when it is restarted it complains of receiving invalid packets. I was only able to discover it, when logging in before the router crashed entirely.
It may explain the somewhat random crashes I've been having, which have required router reboots, as well as causing severe problems for Windows 10 machines (multiple, repeated IPV6 addresses [literally 100s], high CPU usage, poor response to human inputs). These computers are rendered useless.
The event viewer on the Windows 10 side includes:
1. mDNS_Execute: m->NewLocalRecords exceeded loop limit
2. Timed out waiting for acknowledgement of machine sleep
This commit in Avahi that may be relevant:
https://github.com/lathiat/avahi/commit/de7cde877e4daa5d9d4fb5b1a349299eaa94969d
Unfortunately, I think this only stops the logging of the problem, rather than fixing the underlying issue. Hence the filling of the log with all those messages before Merlin stopped that logging.
When I restart the avahi daemon after the problem has occurred once, one CPU immediately goes to 100, and I see the following messages in the syslog on the router:
Nov 9 20:57:23 avahi-daemon[27237]: Invalid response packet from host 192.168.1.100.
Nov 9 20:57:23 avahi-daemon[27237]: Invalid response packet from host 192.168.1.101.
When run without being a daemon, I also find error:
Received packet from invalid interface.
This error corresponds to a avahi_dns_packet_get_field in the commit avahi git.
It can take days until the problem occurs.
These Windows 10 machines (.100 & .101) are running mdnsresponder from iTunes.
Even if I do not use iTunes on the routers, avahi is still started, and I suspect it as the underlying problem.
I'll try to inform the avahi developers about this information, but I am not quite sure how to get in touch.
For now, I have iTunes turned off under the web setting for the router, but I am also killing off the daemon at each dhcp-event.
Thanks,
Pablo