Release Asuswrt-Merlin 386.4 is now available

[128bit]

i thought i had a fairly good working knowledge of networking hw/sw until now! these conversations make me think i had no formal tcp/ip training.

gotta a question though as after all this reading with the many issues, my butt got puckered. should i wait for the next release .5 as i'm currently running fine.

i have nas with some static ips and all work fine on 386.3_2 which was my first venture away from "official." i love it but at this stage my pioneering days are few.

any thoughts?

 

[RMerlin]

Wifi code comes directly as 100% binary files from Asus. There is nothing for me to test or investigate there, wifi is what it is. Start reviewing your wifi configuration first. The fact that most client issues are on the 2.4 GHz lead me to believe that most of you are keeping advanced features enabled such as Implicit Beamforming or Airtime Fairness, which has well documented problems with a lot of cheap IoT wifi SoCs. Disable these features on the 2.4 GHz band, none of your clients can make use of them anyway. Sometimes, a complete power cycle (not just a reboot) of the router and the clients has also been known to help, as it ensures both are trying to establish a fresh connection.

For the record, my Roomba is connected to my 2.4 GHz band, and despite being at the complete other end of the apartment and being parked right next to my microwave oven (which is why connection time typically gets reset about every 24 hours), it was showing 31 hours of connection time when I checked earlier tonight before flashing a new firmware build. (which means the connection even survived me microwaving my pizza 6 hours ago). My Goovee light that I turn on at night have also no problem connecting to the 2.4 GHz band. As for the 5 GHz band, both my tablet and my phone both showed over 130 hours of connection time.

Regarding the WAN Disconnection State: please, read post #2. So far, the vast majority of issues turned out to be self-inflicted wounds from people who had cleared the value, or replaced it with an incorrect value (www.google.com is NOT a good test, as the IP address will change depending on which DNS servers you are querying). Restoring the WAN monitoring to proper values will fix it.

 

[RMerlin]

It may just be me, but I find logging into AC86U, or AX88U via HTTPS is woefully slow.
Navigating around once in is also pretty awful - very slow.
Via HTTP is snappy & no problems.
I would be happy to use HTTPS, but not the way it is.

(This may not be your issue, just sharing what happens here….)

For some unknown reasons, browsers don't like the self-signed certificate generated by the router. The problem has existed for years, and I have absolutely no idea what web browsers are doing that causes these stalls with self-signed certs (but not with certificates from a recognized CA).

Someone with expert knowledge on how browsers handle TLS with these self-signed certificate would have to investigate. I know that many years ago there was a known issue with Firefox and certificates lacking an Email field (despite the fact that field is supposed to be optional). I added a bogus email field to work around the issue at the time. The ticket gathered dust for months (if not years) on Bugzilla, no idea what came out of it.

 

[RMerlin]

I get to the router.asus.com login page, but when I enter my credentials the page doesn't load.

Try accessing it by its IP instead. Asus has been doing a lot of "enhancements" lately to "encourage" people to switch to https, and I have seen cause issues at least with AiMesh nodes so far.

I think we can all admit this new behavior is at the very least , not ideal. I was just wondering, why not just rever the code to the last known working revision.

That would be you going back to 386.3_2. I don't get changes as a series of documented patches. All I get is a 1 GB archive of code, that I merge with mine by comparing it with the previously merged archive in a three-way diff. I have no idea what changes does what, so I can't single out an individual change and reverse it. And anyway, connection monitoring IS working. People just need to reverse what invalid settings they have applied that are breaking it for their setup.

 

[RMerlin]

Getting a lot of the following notices in the logs (is it due to 5ghz auto channel?), but everything seems to be working so its not a problem, will lock the channel down and see if it clears it.

acsd is the Automatic Channel Selection Daemon.

 

[kernol]

Always had to be set to Yes to enable DNSSEC via dnsmasq.
I enable DNSSEC in Stubby using a stubby post config file. I ran all the test links you provided with positive results.

Thanks for your response - however I am back with Enable DNSSEC support set to "No" and passing all those DNSSEC tests.
Stubby is built into Merlinware and I recall clearly that the correct setting is "No".

What is interesting is that it came right after changing "Connect to DNS Server automatically" to "No" and inserting Quad9 servers as the required router's DNS ... in addition to adding them under DoT servers for clients ... go figure ???

 

[RMerlin]

Thanks for your response - however I am back with Enable DNSSEC support set to "No" and passing all those DNSSEC tests.
Stubby is built into Merlinware and I recall clearly that the correct setting is "No".

What is interesting is that it came right after changing "Connect to DNS Server automatically" to "No" and inserting Quad9 servers as the required router's DNS ... in addition to adding them under DoT servers for clients ... go figure ???

For some odd reason DNSSEC only gets enabled in Stubby if it's set to "2", while it should looking for "1" rather. Not sure why, I'd have to investigate in past commits if this could be old leftover.

 

[explorer200]

Try accessing it by its IP instead. Asus has been doing a lot of "enhancements" lately to "encourage" people to switch to https, and I have seen cause issues at least with AiMesh nodes so far.

I tried that right away, no luck. Thanks for the response though! I'll just reboot it next time I'm at the cabin

 

[Pergola Fabio]

after reading all latest pages, i'm afraid to update the firmware on my current ac88u and ac86u , i have a lot of iot hardware here, all connected to 2.4

 

[slayerking]

Wifi code comes directly as 100% binary files from Asus. There is nothing for me to test or investigate there, wifi is what it is. Start reviewing your wifi configuration first. The fact that most client issues are on the 2.4 GHz lead me to believe that most of you are keeping advanced features enabled such as Implicit Beamforming or Airtime Fairness, which has well documented problems with a lot of cheap IoT wifi SoCs. Disable these features on the 2.4 GHz band, none of your clients can make use of them anyway. Sometimes, a complete power cycle (not just a reboot) of the router and the clients has also been known to help, as it ensures both are trying to establish a fresh connection.

For the record, my Roomba is connected to my 2.4 GHz band, and despite being at the complete other end of the apartment and being parked right next to my microwave oven (which is why connection time typically gets reset about every 24 hours), it was showing 31 hours of connection time when I checked earlier tonight before flashing a new firmware build. (which means the connection even survived me microwaving my pizza 6 hours ago). My Goovee light that I turn on at night have also no problem connecting to the 2.4 GHz band. As for the 5 GHz band, both my tablet and my phone both showed over 130 hours of connection time.

Regarding the WAN Disconnection State: please, read post #2. So far, the vast majority of issues turned out to be self-inflicted wounds from people who had cleared the value, or replaced it with an incorrect value (www.google.com is NOT a good test, as the IP address will change depending on which DNS servers you are querying). Restoring the WAN monitoring to proper values will fix it.

Starting to think it was something wrong with the download. First time I downloaded it I got a zip that was called something like "xxxvista_win7xxx.zip" deleted that and downloaded again from exact same place (sourceforge) and it sent me 384.10 deleted that and tried again got the right 386.4 but it was the one giving me trouble. I just downloaded it again just for you an hour ago and it dirty flashed just fine, no more https warning when logging in, no more pages not loading both in the firmware and web pages it all seems fine now.

 

[albinoman887]

Try accessing it by its IP instead. Asus has been doing a lot of "enhancements" lately to "encourage" people to switch to https, and I have seen cause issues at least with AiMesh nodes so far.



That would be you going back to 386.3_2. I don't get changes as a series of documented patches. All I get is a 1 GB archive of code, that I merge with mine by comparing it with the previously merged archive in a three-way diff. I have no idea what changes does what, so I can't single out an individual change and reverse it. And anyway, connection monitoring IS working. People just need to reverse what invalid settings they have applied that are breaking it for their setup.

fair enough. did you see my later post though? cuz i did a full M&M reset/config when setting this up so i know i didnt have any leftover nvram values that were invalid . but reguardless i did manage to get monitoring working without dns query going at all surprisingly. I dont totally understand why though could you shed some light? Basically went to Admin settings and checked the DNS query box which then shows the two dialog boxes for hostname and resolving ips. I hit apply, page reloads. I deleted both entries and left them blank, then applied, then i unchecked dns query and applied again. Ive rebooted multiple times in the hours since to and it still is correctly reporting the network is up what the heck?

could it be that your hard coded fallback option is still active? is there any log or sysfs path i can check to ensure its not still querying. I looked through syslog and dnsmasq.log but i'm concerned since its the actual router doing the querying , not a device on the lan that it isnt being included in all the logs .

finally , to your point about not having any documentation on the patches. I understand this but (again just curious not trying to suggest you must do anything) but from my experience with diffing code is after awhile, even without git commit history or anything you still start to get a feel of the code layout, is it that badly orginzied that you cant even identify the blocks of code for it, no like wan_link_mnitor function or anything where you could just litteraly revert all code relating to those fonctions to what it was previously?

thanks for your time

 

[xhenon]

Hello guys,

First of all, @RMerlin thanks for your job on this firmware. It's amazing, and also, thank to the people help on this forum.

I have a question about last update. Today I updated from version 386.3 to 386.4 and then I reveived the yellow esclamation icon saying "Your router is running low on free NVRAM, which might affect its stability..."

Checking filesystems I see following:

ASUSWRT-Merlin RT-AC68U 386.4_0 Sat Jan 1 18:42:21 UTC 2022
admin@RT-AC68U:/tmp/home/root# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 32.0M 32.0M 0 100% /
devtmpfs 124.8M 0 124.8M 0% /dev
tmpfs 124.9M 1.9M 123.0M 1% /tmp
/dev/mtdblock4 62.8M 5.1M 57.6M 8% /jffs

As you can see my jffs partition is almos empty so, why I can see this warning message on my router?

Thank you in advance.
Regards.

 

[albinoman887]

fair enough. did you see my later post though? cuz i did a full M&M reset/config when setting this up so i know i didnt have any leftover nvram values that were invalid . but reguardless i did manage to get monitoring working without dns query going at all surprisingly. I dont totally understand why though could you shed some light? Basically went to Admin settings and checked the DNS query box which then shows the two dialog boxes for hostname and resolving ips. I hit apply, page reloads. I deleted both entries and left them blank, then applied, then i unchecked dns query and applied again. Ive rebooted multiple times in the hours since to and it still is correctly reporting the network is up what the heck?

could it be that your hard coded fallback option is still active? is there any log or sysfs path i can check to ensure its not still querying. I looked through syslog and dnsmasq.log but i'm concerned since its the actual router doing the querying , not a device on the lan that it isnt being included in all the logs .

finally , to your point about not having any documentation on the patches. I understand this but (again just curious not trying to suggest you must do anything) but from my experience with diffing code is after awhile, even without git commit history or anything you still start to get a feel of the code layout, is it that badly orginzied that you cant even identify the blocks of code for it, no like wan_link_mnitor function or anything where you could just litteraly revert all code relating to those fonctions to what it was previously?

thanks for your time

@RMerlin

Last post about this i swear . I peeked at the source and found the relevant code and I think maybe the reason i was able to do what i did and still show internet connected has to do with the fact i'm on a PPPoE connection... The code that made me think this is linked below

https://github.com/RMerl/asuswrt-merlin.ng/blob/f680f731bcb5cf9e6c6186df106b75f6341ed267/release/src/router/rc/wanduck.c#L1068

starting at like 1068. Am i on to something or way off base here?

 

[Matthew Patrick]

Hello guys,

First of all, @RMerlin thanks for your job on this firmware. It's amazing, and also, thank to the people help on this forum.

I have a question about last update. Today I updated from version 386.3 to 386.4 and then I reveived the yellow esclamation icon saying "Your router is running low on free NVRAM, which might affect its stability..."

Checking filesystems I see following:

ASUSWRT-Merlin RT-AC68U 386.4_0 Sat Jan 1 18:42:21 UTC 2022
admin@RT-AC68U:/tmp/home/root# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 32.0M 32.0M 0 100% /
devtmpfs 124.8M 0 124.8M 0% /dev
tmpfs 124.9M 1.9M 123.0M 1% /tmp
/dev/mtdblock4 62.8M 5.1M 57.6M 8% /jffs

As you can see my jffs partition is almos empty so, why I can see this warning message on my router?

Thank you in advance.
Regards.

Jffs and nvram is different. Check the status page on Tools tab. You'll see the nvram space

 

[xhenon]

Jffs and nvram is different. Check the status page on Tools tab. You'll see the nvram space

Thanks for your reply.

This is what I can see:

Is this somethin I must to worry about?
Is there any way to solve this issue?

Regards

 

[xhenon]

Thanks for your reply.

This is what I can see:

View attachment 38286

Is this somethin I must to worry about?
Is there any way to solve this issue?

Regards

Hello again,

Adding adition information I think could be interesting.

Checking with nvram status command, I can see a lot of variables empy, I mean, after equals sign, there isn't any parametter like for example:

wan1_hwaddr=
dhcp_wins_x=
vpn_client_gw=

There are 760 entries like this, without any parametter after equal

 

[learning_curve]

Checking with nvram status command, I can see a lot of variables empy, I mean, after equals sign, there isn't any parametter like for example:

wan1_hwaddr=
dhcp_wins_x=
vpn_client_gw=

There are 760 entries like this, without any parametter after equal

This old post, the post just before it (and the thread itself) is relevant to your post above @xhenon

Solved - High nvram usage

I was playing with my RT-AC56U running RMerlin 384.5 and I noticed by accident that the nvram usage is a bit high: NVRAM usage: 65545 / 65536 bytes It seems I am 9 bytes over the limit and yet the router *appears* to be running fine. I do use long wifi passwords, have 30+ static dhcp bindings...

www.snbforums.com

 

[Unisoft]

For some odd reason DNSSEC only gets enabled in Stubby if it's set to "2", while it should looking for "1" rather. Not sure why, I'd have to investigate in past commits if this could be old leftover.

This has confused me

So for DNSSec, do I need to set the GUI option for it to NO (I have YES at the moment)?

I have 'Connect to DNS Server automatically' set to NO and use Cloudflare IP instead and also use DNS over TLS using Cloudflare (family).

I've not got any other addins loaded at the moment.

Thanks...

 

[Pergola Fabio]

For the wifi issues, i read also about the power sare mode : WMM APSD
what is best practice? turn it on or off?

 

[Ramz]

Thanks Merlin this is my 7th dirty update spanning over 7 versions and running strong. Only issue on my AC86u is my 2.4 GHZ not working nothing will connect to it even though I see it on my network. I have come to think it's defect in the router itself.