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

[krick]

I'm currently running: 374.43_33E7j9527 on an ASUS RT-AC68U

I enabled QoS at one point so I could set up some bandwidth limiting on specific machines on my network, but I don't need to do that anymore and I've removed those rules.

How do I turn QoS off now? When I try to change the slider to "OFF", I get an error message...

"Please define Bandwidth Limiter rules before enabling the Bandwidth Limiter!"

If I switch the radio button to the "Traditional QoS" setting and try to turn it off again, I get this message instead...

"Fields cannot be blank"

Should this being doing input validation when I'm trying to turn it off? Or am I missing something subtle about how it works?

 

[ColinTaylor]

@krick Try updating to the current release. I don't know whether it will fix your problem specifically but there were a lot of changes around QoS input validation in release 43.

 

[atkinsom]

Ok, this is how it looks in FirefoxView attachment 16165

While in Safari the login window popsup every 10 seconds or so and it doesn't remember the login details although I have checked Remember... (well, they are stored in the Keychain but they are not pre-filled). It has been like this since I installed Merlin a couple of weeks ago. Clearing cookies didn't solve the problem. View attachment 16166

Do the following in Firefox...common issue in my house
options/privacy and security/cookies and site data/manage data
type in the ip address you use for your router in the search and delete all the entries
Logins & Passwords/saved logins
do the exact same thing as above

Safari is a bit different but the concept is the same...remove ALL entries for the router from the keychain and any other area which escapes my memory but a google will tell you how

Good luck

 

[Hunny Puppy]

I've noticed something strange on my N66U running the latest merlin john's fork firmware. I was trying to figure out which is the best 5Ghz channel to use using INSSider and I noticed a strange unknown channel kept popping up. Everytime I'd change the 5Ghz control channel (I'm using 40Mhz) another infrastructure SSID would pop up using the same base control channel.
It seems to be coming from the router for 2 reasons:
1. When I disable 5Ghz, the ghost SSID disappears
2. Whatever base control channel I select, the ghost SSID seems to mirror the control channel

What's REALLY confusing is that the MAC address for this ghost SSID seems to be invalid. I can't seem to track it down, it's not any known vendor.

Anyone else seeing this and might know what's going on and why the router is advertising this Ghost channel on an Open authentication?

 

[ColinTaylor]

@Hunny Puppy Are you using any repeaters or wireless extenders?

 

[Hunny Puppy]

@Hunny Puppy Are you using any repeaters or wireless extenders?

No but you got me thinking so I started googling and I found a reference to Google Home Guest Mode. It turns out that my Google Home and Amazon Fire Stick appear to be creating this ghost SSID which mirrors the router's channel. I hate that they're using a reserved MAC address making it difficult to track down, I had to turn off each devices and see the inSSIDer graphs to identify the devices. Thanks for your help!

On an unrelated note but for those interested, I was looking into Hardware Acceleration for my router and if it's worth giving up features (QoS and IPTraffic i.e. Per Device IP traffic monitoring). All the articles I found said that would only be helpful at higher speeds etc.

I've gotten about 80-100 Mbps on my N66U on the 5Ghz channel for my WiFi LAN for large file transfers and about 40-50Mbps for my internet connection over WiFi (I get 150Mbps through Ethernet). This number vary's about 10-15% and I've been testing this for years now without any significant change no matter what options I selected (channels, transmit powers, advanced wifi settings etc etc).

I decided to try it out anyways, so I turned off IPTraffic from the Tools section and rebooted the router.

Now I'm getting 200-220 Mbps on my LAN WiFi over 5Ghz and maxed out the internet at 150Mbps over WiFi. WOW THAT WAS INCREDIBLE, I did nothing else expect turn off IPTraffic and reboot causing the router to switch to hardware accelerated mode. There are many great articles that talk about how hardware acceleration works, pro's cons' etc but everyone said don't expect a difference unless you're in the 200Mbps+ to gigabit range. I'm sorry but on my N66U, I doubled the performance instantly and my latency has dropped by 30% as well. I don't see any more streaming stutter which I would occasionally see. I guess there's a BIG difference on the RT-N66U running John's latest fork with hardware acceleration turned on. I can totally live without advanced QoS and IPTraffic (I still have usage consumption at the router level just not at the IP level) for this huge improvement in performance. Plus I noticed the average CPU consumption reduced from 1% to 0% (not a big difference I know but I guess the latency or CPU processing was just killing the routers performance in my case). YMMV

I hope this helps other folks.

 

[ColinTaylor]

@Hunny Puppy That was going to be my next suggestions (Google/Amazon). I've found that they create the "ghost" access point so that they can do screen "casting" or "mirroring" (or whatever they're calling it this month). Because their WiFi chip-sets can't transmit on two different channels at the same time they end up using the same channel that their normal network connection is using. My smart TV does the same.

Regarding the hardware acceleration issue. Yes, I found the same with my old N66U. At about 120Mbps the CPU ran out of steam necessitating the use of hardware acceleration. I think the ~200Mbps figure you hear being talked about is in relation to the AC68U and its variants (which is what I have now). The AC68U being a much more common device.

 

[Hunny Puppy]

@Hunny Puppy That was going to be my next suggestions (Google/Amazon). I've found that they create the "ghost" access point so that they can do screen "casting" or "mirroring" (or whatever they're calling it this month). Because their WiFi chip-sets can't transmit on two different channels at the same time they end up using the same channel that their normal network connection is using. My smart TV does the same.

Regarding the hardware acceleration issue. Yes, I found the same with my old N66U. At about 120Mbps the CPU ran out of steam necessitating the use of hardware acceleration. I think the ~200Mbps figure you hear being talked about is in relation to the AC68U and its variants (which is what I have now). The AC68U being a much more common device.

I have a related question to which I can't seem to find an answer. I have a couple of old routers lying around like the RT-N16U and WNR3500Lv2 which I believe also support CTF (hardware acceleration).
The question is do routers use CTF when in wireless bridge mode? They are being used to connect a bunch of ethernet devices to the WiFi network, does CTF help in the Wireless Ethernet Bridge mode?

 

[ColinTaylor]

I have a related question to which I can't seem to find an answer. I have a couple of old routers lying around like the RT-N16U and WNR3500Lv2 which I believe also support CTF (hardware acceleration).
The question is do routers use CTF when in wireless bridge mode? They are being used to connect a bunch of ethernet devices to the WiFi network, does CTF help in the Wireless Ethernet Bridge mode?

No. CTF only accelerates the routing between the WAN and the LAN. With a wireless bridge (what Asus calls a Media Bridge) there is no routing taking place. So in theory the limiting factor will be the speed of the wireless connection.

 

[Hunny Puppy]

No. CTF only accelerates the routing between the WAN and the LAN. With a wireless bridge (what Asus calls a Media Bridge) there is no routing taking place. So in theory the limiting factor will be the speed of the wireless connection.

Thanks so if I'm reading and understanding it correctly the CTF (aka Fast NAT) applies to only NAT traversal, that's when you have multiple devices sitting behind a single IP and that NAT (Network Address Translation) is accelerating the look up table to "route" the packets from the LAN (multiple local IPs) to the WAN (single WAN IP). When in bridge mode the packets are just being forwarded between the interfaces and there is no mapping (NAT) taking place hence CTF doesn't apply. Is that correct?

 

[ColinTaylor]

Thanks so if I'm reading and understanding it correctly the CTF (aka Fast NAT) applies to only NAT traversal, that's when you have multiple devices sitting behind a single IP and that NAT (Network Address Translation) is accelerating the look up table to "route" the packets from the LAN (multiple local IPs) to the WAN (single WAN IP). When in bridge mode the packets are just being forwarded between the interfaces and there is no mapping (NAT) taking place hence CTF doesn't apply. Is that correct?

Correct.

 

[Zetto]

Yes, I found the same with my old N66U. At about 120Mbps the CPU ran out of steam necessitating the use of hardware acceleration. I think the ~200Mbps figure you hear being talked about is in relation to the AC68U and its variants (which is what I have now). The AC68U being a much more common device.

Well, under Freshtomato my N66U could handle 200Mbit, 300mbit with bcm_nat (CTF on tomato). It's the Merlin or this fork specifically which seems to be bogged down to 120Mbit without fast NAT on N66U.

 

[Zetto]

I guess there's a BIG difference on the RT-N66U running John's latest fork with hardware acceleration turned on.

N66U should be able to handle up to 700-800mbit pipe with CTF, I know for a fact that this fork with CTF enabled can do 500mbit. However it does disable a lot more features than just QoS and IPtraffic, I lost my IPV6 tunnel, it's incompatible with CTF for some reason, which kinda sucks since my ISP still doesn't offer IPV6

 

[Hunny Puppy]

N66U should be able to handle up to 700-800mbit pipe with CTF, I know for a fact that this fork with CTF enabled can do 500mbit.

How did you achieve that? I've turned off pretty much everything, turned off IPv6 and it still maxes out at about 220 on WiFi LAN transfers. So what a I missing here?

 

[ColinTaylor]

How did you achieve that? I've turned off pretty much everything, turned off IPv6 and it still maxes out at about 220 on WiFi LAN transfers. So what a I missing here?

What do you mean by "WiFi LAN transfers"? WiFi client to the internet? WiFi client to another WiFi client? WiFi client to a wired LAN client?

 

[Zetto]

How did you achieve that? I've turned off pretty much everything, turned off IPv6 and it still maxes out at about 220 on WiFi LAN transfers. So what a I missing here?

Sorry, I wasn't clear, I was not talking about wifi speed, only ethernet, WiFi is not going to be much higher than 200mbit, I got about the same, it is limited by N-standard on N66U. You may see higher throughput with AC clients on AC66U.

 

[Hunny Puppy]

Just for clarification. Asus merlin for N66U releases stopped at v380.70. Have the additional changes / updates been back ported to this fork or is still on v274?

 

[ColinTaylor]

Just for clarification. Asus merlin for N66U releases stopped at v380.70. Have the additional changes / updates been back ported to this fork or is still on v274?

Yes. Check out the change log.

 

[Hunny Puppy]

Yes. Check out the change log.

yes I did see the backports and updates but I wasn’t clear because the title and firmware versions still say 374.43. Shouldn’t it be updated to 380.70 with a necessary suffix?

Another question, not related to the above but I cannot seem to find answer on any thread. The Asus Merlin version have a Smart Connect feature which is basically band steering. There a way to configure band steering in John’s fork?

 

[ColinTaylor]

yes I did see the backports and updates but I wasn’t clear because the title and firmware versions still say 374.43. Shouldn’t it be updated to 380.70 with a necessary suffix?

No. This firmware was forked from 374.43_2. This is explained in post #1.

Another question, not related to the above but I cannot seem to find answer on any thread. The Asus Merlin version have a Smart Connect feature which is basically band steering. There a way to configure band steering in John’s fork?

I don't think this fork has Smart Connect at all. I might be wrong about that but I've not seen it on my N66U or AC68U. AFAIK even on stock firmware Smart Connect isn't present on any of the routers supported by this firmware.