Does Asuswrt-Merlin support the Asus GT-AC5300 Router?

[Daniel Siegel]

I have an ASUS GT-AC5300 Router, which is limited to 64 Manually Assigned IP addresses.
I noticed that the screenshots of the Asuswrt-Merlin firmware appear to support 128 Manually Assigned IP addresses, but dont know if this will work with my GT-AC5300 router.

Can anyone confirm that my router is supported, and that this firmware will support 128 Manually Assigned IP addresses?

Also wanted to confirm that, if something goes wrong, I can simply upload my "official" ASUS firmware and be back to where I started.

Thanks very much.
Dan

 

[skeal]

I have an ASUS GT-AC5300 Router, which is limited to 64 Manually Assigned IP addresses.
I noticed that the screenshots of the Asuswrt-Merlin firmware appear to support 128 Manually Assigned IP addresses, but dont know if this will work with my GT-AC5300 router.

Can anyone confirm that my router is supported, and that this firmware will support 128 Manually Assigned IP addresses?

Also wanted to confirm that, if something goes wrong, I can simply upload my "official" ASUS firmware and be back to where I started.

Thanks very much.
Dan

Sorry to say your router hasn't been and will never be supported, due to the uniqueness of the device.

 

[Daniel Siegel]

Sorry to hear that, but thanks for the prompt reply.
Can you recommend another comparable Router that does support 128 or more IP reservations (either natively or via the Asuswrt-merlin firmware)?

 

[skeal]

Sorry to hear that, but thanks for the prompt reply.
Can you recommend another comparable Router that does support 128 or more IP reservations (either natively or via the Asuswrt-merlin firmware)?

That router is in a league of its own. What is that big unit doing for you? The ac86u and ax88u are the super powered routers right now but neither is a "Gaming" router.

 

[ColinTaylor]

A similar question was just asked here. Be aware that since Asus implemented size limits on NVRAM variables (384.x firmwares) the maximum number of DHCP entries is limited to about 80 in reality.

 

[Daniel Siegel]

Yah, it was definitely overkill.
However, I do like the wireless range and the dual band, though I still need 3-4 extra Access Points to cover my home (guest house, etc).
They are all wired (lots of conduit and CAT6 almost everywhere).

My Comcast cable speed is currently about 475 down and limited to about 12 up. So I want to ensure the router is not a bottleneck.
The primary features that I use are the naming of devices and the Manually Assigned IP Reservations (as I have 100-200 devices - lots of home automation stuff).
Much easier to troubleshoot everything with IP Reservations.

I have noticed that the ASUS (like other routers I tried in the past) is pretty flaky in keeping the device names, accurately indicating whether devices are connected, etc.
Not sure how to remedy that problem, or if other routers are more reliable.

Not fun to switch routers, but I am open to doing so if I will gain reliability and a higher IP Reservation limit (not sure why reserving a few extra bits is so hard) without sacrificing bandwidth and wireless coverage.

Appreciate any thoughts/suggestions.
Thanks
Dan

 

[JDB]

See my signature for my setup. I have a large home and cover it with the AC5300 variant and a number of AiMesh nodes.

I also have a lot of reservations for home automation devices etc.

I’ve not hit a limit yet in the 86U with Merlin (is it also 80 as above!?).

Also worth noting I migrated from the 88U to 86U and ran some manual nvram get/set commands to copy the reservations and custom names over save doing a lot of manual typing whilst avoiding any kind of risky automated full config migration.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[ColinTaylor]

I’ve not hit a limit yet in the 86U with Merlin (is it also 80 as above!?).

It's actually a 2999 byte limit so the exact number of entries will vary slightly depending on the length of the host names. I don't think the limits are different for different models.

 

[JDB]

It's actually a 2999 byte limit so the exact number of entries will vary slightly depending on the length of the host names. I don't think the limits are different for different models.

Ah yea I see it. Not something easily extendable by @RMerlin I guess or he’d likely have already done it!


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[sbsnb]

Ah yea I see it. Not something easily extendable by @RMerlin I guess or he’d likely have already done it!

Not sure how doable it is, but since MAC addresses and IPV4 addresses are both ASCII representations of raw bytes, there is the opportunity to store that data as bytes rather than ASCII and save space. For example, current format is thus:

<DE:AD:BE:EF:CA:FE>192.168.1.2>Hostname

39 characters to represent the DCHP reservation. However, if we were to base64 encode the actual bytes the MAC address (to stick to ASCII characters in NVRAM), a separator (0x00 in this case), and the IP address it would require only:

3q2+78r+AMCoAQI=>Hostname

25 characters. We can do even better. Since we already know the LAN subnet mask, all we really need for a reservation is the offset from the beginning of the subnet (+1 in this case). So, the MAC and IP reservation could be base64 encoded as:

3q2+78r+AAE=>Hostname

21 characters, a 46% reduction in size. This would give room for anywhere from 120 - 142 reservations in 2999 bytes (depending on the subnet mask and the offset of the assigned IP from the subnet mask).

Of course this would require some code to pack and unpack the data in NVRAM when it's needed, and that's the part that I don't know how feasible it is.

 

[PeterT]

Why not just run the DHCP server on a seperate device? Nothing says it has to be on the router

 

[sbsnb]

I tried it on my current set up with 20 reservations and it reduced the variable size from 906 bytes to 516 bytes. If I gzip the data before base64 I get down to 428 bytes for 20 DHCP reservations.

Of course, all of this might be more easily handled by making two NVRAM variables and concatenating them as needed.

 

[sbsnb]

Why not just run the DHCP server on a seperate device? Nothing says it has to be on the router

For me, I don't want another 24x7 device running to serve up DHCP. I know a lot of people have other servers on the network that could easily be configured to handle the DHCP.

 

[loveleeyoungae]

For me, I don't want another 24x7 device running to serve up DHCP. I know a lot of people have other servers on the network that could easily be configured to handle the DHCP.

If we run Merlin fw, shouldn't we just use dnsmasq.conf.add to add DHCP reservations?

 

[FilipMvP]

Sorry to say your router hasn't been and will never be supported, due to the uniqueness of the device.

what do you mean ? there is a Merlin version for ac5300

 

[JDB]

what do you mean ? there is a Merlin version for ac5300

For the RT version not the GT!

 

[AndreiV]

what do you mean ? there is a Merlin version for ac5300

[FAQ] READ ME FIRST before posting a question

https://www.snbforums.com/threads/faq-read-me-first-before-posting-a-question.47153/

http://asuswrt.lostrealm.ca/about

The same also applies to the model ROG RAPTURE GT-AX11000

 

[FilipMvP]

thank you guess i was blind for this important aspect .... so i made mistake with buying this router ...