I upgraded our personal RT-AC86 and GT-AC2900 from 386.13.2 to 386.14, it's the first time in years an upgrade on these units has gone a bit sideways; the result for the RT-AC86 wins the prize for wonkiest upgrade I've ever experienced, at least in the past 10 years. Both of these routers never have had an issue, all past upgrades were flawless, I don't run any extras, no scripts, no VPN server. After the release of this version, I monitored the forum before decided to install. I checked the file hash, restarted the AC86 then defaulted most of the settings, turned the wifi and VPN off before loading the upgrade and rebooting. Afterwards, it took 5 minutes before it tried but failed to restart. The router won't boot to GUI and won't respond to multiple rescue/recovery attempts with ample time between attempts. I haven't had to resort to this for quite a while, but L&LD's explicit nuclear reset sequence will be the next step.
Several years ago I ordered two RT-AC86s from Amazon during a sale, one for a customer and the other as a spare. There were multiple reports of faulty routers at the time and I return both of those as bad out of the box as they would not reboot or recover, though the replacements Amazon sent were fine. This particular '86 is not one from that time, and until now it has run without any issues, 12-15 hours per day for the past 3 years, powered from an APC UPS battery backup.
The GT-AC2900 is two years old and has only been in service for a year. It's run flawlessly on Merlin as all our routers run for many years. At least this unit has survived this upgrade, so far. There's no logic of reason for both of these units to offer a problem with the upgrade, as I applied the particular FW for each model listing. Not counting the 'Aura' lighting effects. they're AC86s since there's no ROG file in this FW build. This router also ran long during the update, but at least it restarted to the GUI. Since then unlike the '86, It's been running for over a day. The GUI response is sluggish, but the main issue is that it doesn't display data in areas where it should. As always, I reentered all data from scratch, this time it took 2-3 times before it would save properly. Wi-fi and VPN are now running normally but no data shows in the system log nor for the clients on the main/WAN network map area of the first page. By clicking on the 'View List' tab, the 'view all' list is empty; nothing is displayed in the 'Status' area. Clicking on the 'System Status' heading shows a left and right arrow under Status, then by clicking on the arrow then shows an 'Online, Wired and Wireless' heading. Clicking on the left arrow tab displays devices which are connected. Surprisingly, when I turned on all of the Trend Micro options, thought it took some time for the data to display, all of the functions seem to be working as they did prior to the upgrade. This gives me hope that I may be able to save this router, though I'm worried about the '86. I know they don't last forever but these have been babied by comparison to others.
If anyone has noticed any similar wonky behavior, for either the RT-AC86 or RT-AC2900 after this upgrade, and has been able to recover from it, it would be great to hear your experience and if/how you've recovered, as I'm stumped. Many thanks.