[Fork] Asuswrt-Merlin 374.43 LTS releases (Archive)

[Deleted member 22229]

What I don't understand is when I use the official 374.43 or the fork my 5ghz power is set to 80 mw anyway but performance and range is much better than Merlin official build so how can it be capped at the same power but worse?

That's a good question maybe John or Merlin could better explain unless there is something more at play then just output or perhaps the power adjustment in the older builds is not accurate and the router is doing more then what it says.

 

[john9527]

What I don't understand is when I use the official 374.43 or the fork my 5ghz power is set to 80 mw anyway but performance and range is much better than Merlin official build so how can it be capped at the same power but worse?

Two things....
(1) It's a different (older) version of the wireless driver which uses a different set of internal operating parameters
(2) In the case of N66 routers, it applies some custom 'tweaks' (what used to be known as 'Engineering Mode' or EM). Starting with the 376 code, these are no longer available.

As far as I can tell these are still 'legal' with respect to the regulatory agencies, but probably push things closer to the edge. Remember at this time is when ASUS was involved with the lawsuit against them for shipping routers outside of the legal limits.

 

[Trebuin]

I've been getting similar error messages to the following:
Jun 15 20:47:04 kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 6564810

The sector is always random, there appears to be no actual damage, and a chkdsk results in nothing. I'm assuming this happens because I have the drive scheduled to spin down. Could someone verify my theory or provide a way to keep that from happening?

 

[john9527]

Does it coincide with a spinup/spindown syslog entry? Which drive/enclosure? There's another thread going on now where it seems minidlna has a problem with a Seagate drive using it's own sleep mechanism.

 

[Trebuin]

Yes, it does coincide, but I have disabled minidlna. It's a Drobo which should have its own spin-up/spin-down. I don't know if it works without a normal computer, but I should probably disable the sleep feature on asus, unless there's no harm from the drive doing this. What's your opinion?

 

[john9527]

I was just using the Seagate as an example where their internal spin down algorithm was causing a problem (happened to be with minidlna restarting, and it looks like the Seagate isn't responding, or at least responding fast enough).

I'm not sure where you are at now, but I would pick either the router or the internal Drobo routine to provide the spindown function, but not both. You might experiment with each one to see if it eliminates the error.

 

[Trebuin]

I've never had the drobo's spin down function turned off and from what I see, there is no option below 15 mins. My dashboard doesn't even allow a timing input, so I just turned it off and will see what happens with Asus running the show & get back with the results.

 

[Trebuin]

I played around with it and using my power meter, I determined that my drive does not spin down, with either the drive or ASUS managing the spin down. I monitored the power up to around 45 mins after ASUS indicated spin down. Drobo itself does not say when it will spin down on its own, only that it will spin down eventually. The errors seem to be some sort of dismount and when a file is called while it is supposedly spun down, the file comes up fine while the error pops up once...then the drive indicates that it has spun up.

I'll be playing around with it a bit more.

 

[bbunge]

Well, I could not stand not setting something up so yesterday afternoon I upgraded my RT-N66R with the latest Merlin build, 378.54_2. After three hours and complaints from my daughter of almost no 5 GHZ connection and poor 2.4 GHZ connection and "I can't watch my movies!" I went back to John's fork. Do not know what got onto me to change something that works! Guess I'll have to go back to Zoneminder on Ubuntu and play with the latest builds while I wait for Windows 10...

 

[Trebuin]

Tested various settings and found there is no real way my drives will go to sleep. It runs at 45w normally and the lowest I ever seen while plugged into the ASUS is 39w. I have 5 Green Western Digitals installed so I may already be operating at the lowest I can with the drobo not actually powered down or in full standby.

 

[john9527]

I thought the WD Green series powered themselves down via the drive firmware.....maybe that's changed. Scientific method...if you put your hand on the enclosure, can you feel them spinning?

 

[Trebuin]

New question: Is there a way to enable the AI cloud/other options in repeater mode?

 

[Trebuin]

I thought the WD Green series powered themselves down via the drive firmware.....maybe that's changed. Scientific method...if you put your hand on the enclosure, can you feel them spinning?

The greens are too quiet for me to year...can't really feel them over the Drobo's fans. You are correct about the power down feature, but it's hard to tell how the raid and the drives interact. I've only seen the boot start at about 10w then climb to 45 max, then drop again to about 39. The Drobo does a lot of back end work so it may not actually let the drives spin down, especially since I have probably 7TB of available space with an older Drobo.

Edit: Apparently not having ASUS manage anything and letting the Drobo do its own thing is the best option...just saw it drop to 23 watts finally.

 

[Lotta Cox]

Hey, seen this today in my log on a 68R. I was fixing a laptop for a friend that was infected with adware. I was able to fully clean it. It seems that something on that laptop was trying to login to my router? Is that possible? I never tried to login to the router from that laptop.
My router username and password is very complicated and not in english so it is pretty secure.
Using firmware 374.43_2-12BEj9527

http://pastebin.com/VdSYjSgZ

 

[john9527]

It seems that something on that laptop was trying to login to my router? Is that possible?

Yes, it's possible. Some of the new anti-virus/security suites will try to scan the network trying the default addresses, logons and passwords for a whole bunch of different products looking for a vulnerability. Someone else reported the same sort of activity about a month ago in another thread.

If would be helpful if you could find out what security product was installed on the laptop so we can add it to our list of 'things to look out for'.

 

[Lotta Cox]

Yes, it's possible. Some of the new anti-virus/security suites will try to scan the network trying the default addresses, logons and passwords for a whole bunch of different products looking for a vulnerability. Someone else reported the same sort of activity about a month ago in another thread.

If would be helpful if you could find out what security product was installed on the laptop so we can add it to our list of 'things to look out for'.

It had Avast. V7 I think. I uninstalled it and put MSE, Malwarebytes AM, and Adguard.

 

[Lotta Cox]

And it seems those logins stopped after uninstalling Avast.

 

[tim28taft]

I been checking 5 times a day to see if V12 is out.

 

[Gravityz]

Yes that is the Avast "scan for network threads" option
scared the hell out of me the first time.

i however initiated it manually

you can turn it off in the settings so that way you can keep avast scanning for regular stuff but get rid of that threat scan.

And it seems those logins stopped after uninstalling Avast.

 

[MuppetSoul]

Any ETA for V12?

Can't put an ETA on stability so best to let John do his thing.