Custom client Icon & Names broken still/again in GUI?

[vibroverbus]

RT-AX68U with Merlin 3004.388.8_4

All has been totally well but I only just noticed Custom Icons and Names seem completely broken?
No ideal how long this has been as I don't look that often.
This was working fine for long time.

All I can find in a search is mentions of the Asus official having a bug and then people saying "but its fixed in Merlin".
Maybe I'm missing a search term if this is a known thing.

Symptoms:

• Had previously assigned custom names and icons for almost all client devices
• Discovered today icons are all scrambled and names display either client reported name, or, MAC address if none - as would be "ASUS normal" for a clean slate install
• I can change names and icons in the usual manner in the GUI, and this seems to work - they'll appear correct in the GUI for a little while - but eventually after some kind of refresh, they revert and boom the custom name is gone, device now displays the clients reported name or MAC again, and the icon is back to some random thing that the firmware chooses.

Any feedback? Thanks in advance.

 

[dave14305]

Compare the current MAC addresses with the configuration in

 nvram get custom_clientlist | sed 's/</\n/g;s/>/\t/g'

Many clients randomize their MAC addresses these days. Just make sure they’re not changing, before blaming the router.

 

[vibroverbus]

Compare the current MAC addresses with the configuration in nvram get custom_clientlist

Many clients randomize their MAC addresses these days. Just make sure they’re not changing, before blaming the router.

I had that initial thought Dave but no I checked that immediately.
This is too widespread anyway (too many dumb old devices that could never do that, not just for instance iOS devices trying to disguise themselves), but yes I looked at the MAC addresses.

But yeah thanks for suggestion. custom_clientlist right now only has the last handful of entries I edited most recently. I probably edited about 3-5 then paused and did another 3-4 and only the last 3-4 are there.

That makes me wonder... There's a bug with AiMesh whereby the static binding NVRAM sta_binding_list is limited to something around 255 characters. That equates to about 8-9 devices given the format of the entries. When you try to go beyond that and add too many bound devices, everything breaks.

I wonder if custom_clientlist likewise breaks on too many entries. It had been working for a long time for me with a lot of entries but maybe something changed or maybe I never noticed it breaking after whatever the count is. If that NVRAM value is also limited to ~255 then it would break somewhere vaguely around 5-7 entries (all depending on how long your custom name text entries are).