DD-WRT for Asus ac68u ver. C1

[Ajinkyajin]

Recently bought an Asus AC68U.The hardware rev. is C1 so its 1GHz CPU.
Came with the firmware ver. 3.0.0.4.380.2717,while setting up got a popup to install latest firmware i.e 3.0.0.4.380.3264,went ahead with the update.Tried to install Merlin-wrt but failed so I downgraded to 3.0.0.4.380.2717 then it installed fine.
But then thought of trying DD-WRT,downloaded the latest beta but sadly I couldn't install it with a popup saying firmware upgrade unsuccessful.
Tried installing through both CFE-web server and Asus Firmware restoration utility but that gave me bootloop.
Although Merlin-WRT 380.59 works,but I really want DDWRT.Bought this router specially for this reason.

So,any way to install DD-WRT on my shiny new router.I really want it

 

[RMerlin]

You'll have to ask the DD-WRT developers if their firmware is compatible with the RT-AC68U HW revision C1, which uses a different CPU from previous revisions.

 

[System Error Message]

I see many always asking or talking about DD-wrt, the truth is dd-wrt is a very poor choice to install on routers. Their firmware is questionable. Openwrt and tomato is much better. If i were to choose between dd-wrt and RMerlin's firmware i'd choose RMerlin's firmware. Even though his firmware keeps stock features it adds a lot of interesting things you dont find in the stock firmware as the stock firmware doesnt want you to shoot yourself in the foot.
Ive seen dd-wrt though never use it. You're more likely going to brick your router with dd-wrt than with RMerlin's firmware, openwrt and tomato. At least with openwrt they have details on steps, models, revisions, issues.

The problem with dd-wrt, and tomato is that hardware revisions dont usually get supported. Openwrt will include hardware revisions clearly in their wiki and many of the budget brands like tp-link and d-link have many.

If online articles and magazines would stop talking about or praising dd-wrt and actually look around. I also see the same about ubiquiti and i can tell you from my experience that their routers are terrible when it comes to changing environments. Their video ad also advertises against cisco but they are far from a cisco competitor, hence the term "cisco alternative". Ubiquiti works great when you use the linux part of the OS but when it comes to actually being a router it does poorly.

I would place dd-wrt in the same catogary as ubuntu, too much publicity, doesnt do the job well. I have much better luck with openSUSE than i have with trying to use ubuntu cloud or server or any of their version 14, the bug that i keep getting prevents me from a successful install, its a well known bug (the mdadm boot loop after fresh install), its really bad for servers that use RAID that dont use mdadm to create it, its been known for well over a year but has not had any attempt to fix it. Its one of the reasons why ubuntu's popularity is slowly declining, the server market is bigger than the consumer market as its a count of machines, not people. The fix for the ubuntu bug i have is to boot the OS and do some file config changes which is impossible being a fresh install and not even booted up. Many geeks and techies will say use dd-wrt or use linux's own mdadm to make your RAID but they're just regurgitating what is being spread around rather than really knowing whats inside or the actual things that go on.

Dont use dd-wrt, use RMerlin's firmware, its really good and there are a lot of articles and tutorials that arent well known about how good it really is. Even i myself who use mikrotik am saying that his firmware is getting close to their capabilities. If you find his firmware not having the features you want than look at tomato or openwrt, they are more stable than dd-wrt and openwrt has many more features than dd-wrt and has always had a nice software library.

 

[Rickers]

I see many always asking or talking about DD-wrt, the truth is dd-wrt is a very poor choice to install on routers. Their firmware is questionable.

[snip]

Ive seen dd-wrt though never use it.

[snip]

Umm, okay, so you think DD-WRT sucks, but you've never used it?

BTW, the word on C1 is that DD-WRT won't currently work on it.

 

[yorgi]

Umm, okay, so you think DD-WRT sucks, but you've never used it?

BTW, the word on C1 is that DD-WRT won't currently work on it.

DD-WRT doesn't support high end routers higher then a 66u, they are all in beta and never get updated.
I have tried DD-WRT and all I can say is that it works well on old linksys wrt54g routers which are now useless because they where only good up to 10 mb/s.

I too would agree that with Merlin you get the best of both worlds, original features with great improvements.
From what I have seen there are really not that many features that you have from tomato or DD-wrt that you don't have with Merlin. Also with these newer routers, DD-WRT don't use up to date drivers for Wi Fi and many other features. If you really look at it, even ASUS themselves are having a hard time getting their act together with their firmware, how on earth would you expect some 3rd party firmware like DD-WRT to keep up with these new routers.
DD-WRT is old news and pretty out of date, So why buy a 88U and handicap it with DD-WRT?
I would never do that. You will loose most of the features you paid so much money for to have in the first place.

 

[System Error Message]

Umm, okay, so you think DD-WRT sucks, but you've never used it?

BTW, the word on C1 is that DD-WRT won't currently work on it.

I've never used it on my own gear, doesnt mean i havent touched it on other peoples gear. I've tried to use dd-wrt before, it ended up in a failure. Its not the best thing out there, its just the alternative with the most press just like ubuntu. These things initially become popular before people start realising the problems and start leaving it.

My main router is mikrotik which is very configurable and i learnt quite a lot about networking from it. So when i say RMerlin's firmware is getting close to their functionality it means that RMerlin's firmware is getting to the point where we can classify it as being configurable. The press always says that using dd-wrt lets you turn your router into a $500 or more router, this is untrue. It only gives you more control over the usual networking features rather than being truely configurable. Both RMerlin's firmware and openWRT have the ability to install software though with RMerlin's firmware it isnt that easy. If dd-wrt was truely configurable like those expensive routers than why cant we choose what QoS algorithm we want? Can we set the buffer sizes on the queues? Can we chain multiple Queues together by combining different algorithms to achieve the desired effect?

So while dd-wrt has a lot of press and capabilities it is not as configurable as RMerlin's firmware or openWRT. You can talk about GUI but RMerlin's firmware keeps ASUS stock GUI. If you want to try 3rd party firmware i strongly suggest using RMerlin's firmware first when it comes to ASUS routers because it is least likely to brick your router, if you need more functionality that his firmware wont give try openWRT.

I could go on about firmwares but what i am trying to say is dont get suckered in by the press. Ubiquiti and mikrotik has routers below $100 that have similar functionality to enterprise routers. To say your firmware is a cisco alternative or has enterprise features means that it must have features they have such as BGP, cisco routing protocols, advanced routing and so on. You will not find BGP or any of the newer routing protocols in dd-wrt because homes do not use them, they are used on the internet between exchanges, big companies and buildings and so on that require a network over the internet that can handle some important requirements (such as redundancy, changing of routes, security, speed).

 

[RMerlin]

OpenWRT is nice, but good luck finding a modern router that's compatible with it. Their open-source policy limits you as to which router can run it.

DD-WRT is a nice alternative. The way I see it, DD-WRT is a developer's project, which would require specific individuals (kinda like Kong does for some models) to take a code snapshot, and finetune that snapshot for a specific model. That's where DD-WRT runs into problems, and finding a specific release that works well for a specific model is problematic. Its current flaws IMHO:

- No development/release schedule
- No dedicated hardware developers (it's almost entirely done by Brainslayer, who probably doesn't have the time to dogfood all these models himself. I'm a strong believer in dog fooding, hence my own policy as to what router I will accept to support)
- Poor documentation (forums are a maze, Wiki is a mess, website and its database provide very, very outdated information

I've used DD-WRT for a couple of time stretches. First on a WRT54G back in its original day, when it initially forked out from Talisman/Alchemy. Then again in its V23 days, on a Linksys WRT310N. Aside for a few versions that had DHCP issues, it did a very good job to fulfill my needs back then.

DD-WRT has its place in the third party firmware market.

 

[System Error Message]

OpenWRT is nice, but good luck finding a modern router that's compatible with it. Their open-source policy limits you as to which router can run it.

DD-WRT is a nice alternative. The way I see it, DD-WRT is a developer's project, which would require specific individuals (kinda like Kong does for some models) to take a code snapshot, and finetune that snapshot for a specific model. That's where DD-WRT runs into problems, and finding a specific release that works well for a specific model is problematic. Its current flaws IMHO:

- No development/release schedule
- No dedicated hardware developers (it's almost entirely done by Brainslayer, who probably doesn't have the time to dogfood all these models himself. I'm a strong believer in dog fooding, hence my own policy as to what router I will accept to support)
- Poor documentation (forums are a maze, Wiki is a mess, website and its database provide very, very outdated information

DD-WRT has its place in the third party firmware market.

Broadcom's closed source policy makes it difficult for 3rd party firmware developers and most routers use broadcom. Its a problem that even the raspberry pi faces as all their versions use broadcom. The chinese alternatives (talking about ARM chipsets) are fully open sourced but people complain about their documentation, quality of drivers and so on but its more of a language barrier and lack of skilled workforce. I find EEE to be easier than software development when it comes to the hardware industry despite the fact that i do computer science.
Im not sure about qualcomm though. I just hope they dont make the same mistakes with their IPQ chipsets, they show a lot of promise in specs. There hasnt been many IPQ based routers on the consumer market.

Thats not to say that openWRT isnt trying, I am happy that they are trying to get their firmware working on mikrotik CCRs, it would give those many unused cores something useful to do.

 

[RMerlin]

It will be interesting to see what impact Lede will have on the third party firmware market, especially on OpenWRT itself.

 

[Ajinkyajin]

Apologies for turning this thread into a DD-WRT vs OpenWRT vs Merlin-WRT .I agree that Merlin-WRT is most stable for Asus.I just wanted to have the more firmware options for my new router and also to boost up my wifi range,does Merlin also has that option?

 

[System Error Message]

Apologies for turning this thread into a DD-WRT vs OpenWRT vs Merlin-WRT .I agree that Merlin-WRT is most stable for Asus.I just wanted to have the more firmware options for my new router and also to boost up my wifi range,does Merlin also has that option?

Replace the antennas of the AC68U with better ones. The antennas used in the AC3200 and newer all are better antennas.

Trying to juice the power can sometimes be a bad idea because you're forgetting that your wifi clients also need to have strong signals to talk back. Positioning, minimising interference and better antennas do a lot better than juicing the tx power as i keep saying in many threads and its why the FCC wanted to lock down routers because idiots were wanting so much tx power that while you get more signal bars further away doesnt mean the client can reach back or communicate at a satisfactory bandwidth.

 

[RMerlin]

and also to boost up my wifi range,does Merlin also has that option?

No, and expect routers and firmwares with such a feature to see it disappear in the near future, due to new regulations forbidding overriding it.

 

[sfx2000]

OpenWRT is nice, but good luck finding a modern router that's compatible with it. Their open-source policy limits you as to which router can run it.

One thing that many people might miss about OpenWRT is that it's been used for much more than just Routers these days due to the wide variety of architectures supported and overall quality of code.

I've seen quite a few embedded linux devices use OpenWRT as the base vs. going with WindRiver, Yocto, or other embedded linux.

And it can be tailored and pruned back so that it fits in a very small memory/flash footprint... I like that the build environment and tool chains are in one directory, and not having to spread things around, or run things as root - all good stuff.

 

[sfx2000]

DD-WRT doesn't support high end routers higher then a 66u, they are all in beta and never get updated.
I have tried DD-WRT and all I can say is that it works well on old linksys wrt54g routers which are now useless because they where only good up to 10 mb/s.

DDWRT is, at the moment, the best alt firmware for the Linksys WRT1900/1200 series, esp Kong's fork which is actively being developed, and is probably the best firmware for that hardware. If you've ever seen the factory LinksysSmartWifi firmware, you'd likely understand

(OpenWRT is also working on the WRT's, but their working much closer to the edge, and there's been some issues with the Armada 385's compared to the V1's with Armada XP - mainly due to the internal differences within the chip itself - cortex-A9 vs. Marvell's custom ARM7 cores in the XP)

I think with the Asus lineup - RMerlin (and John's fork) meets most of people's needs, so not as much demand for the DD-WRT team to push on newer hardware there.

 

[sfx2000]

Thats not to say that openWRT isnt trying, I am happy that they are trying to get their firmware working on mikrotik CCRs, it would give those many unused cores something useful to do.

They're not trying - they're doing - they, as a collective, are working thru some political issues inside the group, hence the fork, but I think calmer heads will sort it out.

Outside of Microtik's odd arch with the Tilera, they've pretty much covered all the other bases... and as I mentioned earlier, many vendors have taken that source outside of router/ap space, and make good things.

 

[sfx2000]

Broadcom's closed source policy makes it difficult for 3rd party firmware developers and most routers use broadcom. Its a problem that even the raspberry pi faces as all their versions use broadcom. The chinese alternatives (talking about ARM chipsets) are fully open sourced but people complain about their documentation, quality of drivers and so on but its more of a language barrier and lack of skilled workforce.

Outside of Ardunio, most of the hobby boards have the same problem...

At least with the BCM270* series that the Pi uses, Broadcom has been a bit open, even to the point of releasing enough info on the GPU side to let folks work on it - which is incredibly important for the FOSS community, as the Pi boots first into the GPU, and then bootstraps the CPU's... that's the reason for the really big Firmaware BLOB on bootup... (BTW, the GPU runs it's own RTOS, Threadx, similar to many of their Wifi chips)

The China boxes - Allwinner has issues with GPL, as do many of the other China ARM chips - it perhaps is a bit intentional on their part as it's a very competitive situation right now, and they're all working with common building blocks. It's a very vibrant community there... and thick soup for evolution.

(Note - the Allwinner H3 is actually a nice chip, but I wouldn't want to write code for it as the GPU is a black hole, but it's cheap enough to just press the "I believe" button and make a mini-STB out of it - it's the secret sauce inside that let's it do 4K at a decent refresh rate @ less than 10 dollars per SoC)

OpenWRT actually supports many of these ARM variants (as well as MIPS, x86, and others) - the value of OpenWRT is not to the router/AP community, but to the embedded developers as a sound, quality, alternative to proprietary licensed software..