Beta [FORK] [DSL] [TESTERS] GNUton's Alpha/Beta Merlin builds

[GNUton]

I guess now it's more clear for me what you mean with "outage", please correct me if I am wrong.

When the "outgage" event comes:
- your router and your devices in your LAN have still access to internet
- you remote NAS cannot connect anymore to the NAS or other devices inside the DSL-AC68U network.

So if this is what is happening:
- your router gets a new WAN/DSL ip address
- yout (name).asuscom.com doesn't work.

To fix this issue:
- you change some settings in the DSL so that you re-triggera DSL connection and somehow the IP gives you back you previous IP or you somehow force the DDNS
to update the IP for your name.asuscomm.com

Hence, If I got it right the problem that you are facing is related to DDNS not updating the IP when the IP change. (again, please correct me if I am wrong)
Logs should have something about this btw.

 

[my_bey]

It would be interesting to see if anyone else on this firmware version is having the same problems or if it is only you. Maybe you can share a screenshot of your wan settings because there has been several changes between those versions. Particularly with the TTL settings or WAN MTU may not be set right for yours isp. For example the default WAN MTU for a cable modem is 1500, you may need to set yours to 1492 or 1452 for your dsl isp provider. Also settings on your QoS may not be set right as well.

Thanks for taking the time and replying. I am attaching some screenshots when when everything is operating normally. (When outage occurs, it is the same.)

 

[my_bey]

Here is some more. There seems to be a limit of 5 attachments.

Note: DSL uptime 3 hours since I toggled Bitswap to overcome the outage vs System uptime: 1 day 21 hours.

This may be happening only to me. I am trying to bring the event to the attention, maybe something is not correct.

 

[my_bey]

I guess now it's more clear for me what you mean with "outage", please correct me if I am wrong.

When the "outgage" event comes:
- your router and your devices in your LAN have still access to internet
- you remote NAS cannot connect anymore to the NAS or other devices inside the DSL-AC68U network.

So if this is what is happening:
- your router gets a new WAN/DSL ip address
- yout (name).asuscom.com doesn't work.

To fix this issue:
- you change some settings in the DSL so that you re-triggera DSL connection and somehow the IP gives you back you previous IP or you somehow force the DDNS
to update the IP for your name.asuscomm.com

Hence, If I got it right the problem that you are facing is related to DDNS not updating the IP when the IP change. (again, please correct me if I am wrong)
Logs should have something about this btw.

When the "outgage" event comes:
- your router and your devices in your LAN have still access to internet. RESPONSE: I can only ping outside. Web pages do not appear. Example: Chrome on my laptop does not show any web page. I cannot see Youtube videos on my laptop or on my Smart TV which has internet access. Or my cell phone cannot reach internet web sites. I have to turn of WiFI and rely on cell phone access to internet using cell data plan.
- you remote NAS cannot connect anymore to the NAS or other devices inside the DSL-AC68U network. RESPONSE: Yes.

So if this is what is happening:
- your router gets a new WAN/DSL ip address. RESPONSE: No, not by itself. If I leave it as is without changing anything. I think WAN IP address as shown on the Network status page will be pingable or the (name).asuscom.com will be pingable without any problems. When I changed the DNS provider, I noticed, WAN IP change.
- yout (name).asuscom.com doesn't work. RESPONSE: See my response in above bullet.

To fix this issue:
- you change some settings in the DSL so that you re-triggera DSL connection and somehow the IP gives you back you previous IP or you somehow force the DDNS
to update the IP for your name.asuscomm.com RESPONSE: If I do not change anything, outage continues. When I changed the DNS server (just to try), outage still continues. It does not fix anything. Changing DNS server seems to trigger the WAN IP to change (I infer this based on not being able to ping (name).asuscom.com anymore. It times out. To fix this issue, I toggle Bitswap setting. It brings back the internet to all devices in the LAN (about 23 of them).


Here is the email I received from Synology account notifying me disconnection (I call this outage) "Connection to (name).synology.me has been lost since 2021-04-24 07:30:03 +03:00. Please check the network connection of your DiskStation, and make sure its DDNS service is enabled."
Time is around 7:30 AM local time.

 

[SomeWhereOverTheRainBow]

Here is some more. There seems to be a limit of 5 attachments.

Note: DSL uptime 3 hours since I toggled Bitswap to overcome the outage vs System uptime: 1 day 21 hours.

This may be happening only to me. I am trying to bring the event to the attention, maybe something is not correct.

On your WAN settings2.jpg, the MTU at the bottom of the page is not set. It should be set to 1492 or 1452, i would try 1492.

 

[my_bey]

I set "Special Requirement from ISP, MTU to 1492" as you recommended.
Thank you.

 

[my_bey]

So far so good. My router has been operating without any occurrence of disconnections for more than 2 days. This is encouraging. I have the bitswap set to enabled. I don't know if it was due to setting the MTU as above or the bitswap being set to enabled or something else. I will be proceeding to installing the USB stick and install some amtm scripts in the next few days.

In any case, I am wondering if a cron task can be generated that can be run, let's say every h hours that will toggle bitswap variable because toggling it causes the disconnection to be cleared in my case. Can someone help?

Thank you in advance,

 

[SomeWhereOverTheRainBow]

So far so good. My router has been operating without any occurrence of disconnections for more than 2 days. This is encouraging. I have the bitswap set to enabled. I don't know if it was due to setting the MTU as above or the bitswap being set to enabled or something else. I will be proceeding to installing the USB stick and install some amtm scripts in the next few days.

In any case, I am wondering if a cron task can be generated that can be run, let's say every h hours that will toggle bitswap variable because toggling it causes the disconnection to be cleared in my case. Can someone help?

Thank you in advance,

glad to hear it is working... keep and eye on it. keep us updated.

 

[my_bey]

I had another episode of disconnection after about 5 days of continuous smooth operation after I installed Diversion, Skynet, scribe, uiScribe and Vnstat.

Interesting observation this time: I was able to access snbforums, but no other websites from my browser. I toggled bitswap to disabled. After 30 sec or so, websites could be accessed again. I toggled bitswap to enabled again (because this seems to give me more stable operation). But this time, after hitting apply, my router's GUI got stuck on "Applying Settings ..." rotating icon. It never healed. Router became inaccessible. I had to hard reboot the router.

 

[my_bey]

I upgraded the firmware to 386.02_4-gnuton1 from 386.02_2-gnuton0_beta1 without factory resetting. It has been operating without problems for more than 5 days.

Edit: I spoke too soon. After about a couple of hours of posting the above, I experienced another outage event with latest stable version of firmware. (Pingable websites but not reachable via LAN devices, browsers, cell phones, etc.!)

 

[inakaya]

Is it possible for you to revert to stock firmware for a while to see if this resolves the problem?

This should indicate whether this is a firmware or hardware problem.

I had a problem with the connection randomly dropping on my dsl-ac68u which was ultimately the hardware. If you Better Search you can hopefully find my post...

 

[my_bey]

Thank you for taking the time and responding to my post.

On my April 17, 2021 post above, I stated this:
"I have DSL-AC68U. I was on a stock Asus firmware for long time, then after finding out (Gnuton) had a firmware version compatible for this DSL modem/router, 384.17_0-gnuton1_DSL_1.0.4.9, I installed it and used it without problems for about a year."

The disconnection issues I am experiencing, started with after installing newer releases of the firmware. I am still experiencing it like every other day even with the stable firmware. I was thinking of reverting to 384.17_0-gnuton1_DSL_1.0.4.9 eventually, not to stock Asus firmware.

I found your post. When my devices gets disconnected from internet, Router network status shows connected. Devices can ping internet. but access is lost from browsers, cell phones, TVs, etc. Manually toggling bitswap resets the connection without rebooting. Then the device gets new WAN IP address. Evertying starts to work correctly after that.

If I can run a script to toggle bitswap with some frequency, that would be temporary solution. I installed ChkWAN from https://github.com/MartineauUK/Chk-WAN. It has capability to download a small file from internet, if that fails, it is supposed to reboot the router. It can also ping certain websites, but in my case they will continue to ping successfully, I am guessing. I am trying that now. If would be perfect if that script could first toggle the bitswap variable. Resetting WAN interface does not fix my disconnection. Just an idea.

 

[inakaya]

It may still be your hardware failing and the only way I think you can rule that out is reinstalling a version of firmware that worked previously.

Completely random suggestion but I think I read posts about problems with an isp reassigning customer's wan IPs (assuming it's dynamic) causing disconnections that might be worth investigating.

Good luck and let us know how you get on.

 

[my_bey]

The ChkWAN.sh script by @Martineau's small file transfer test successfully detected an outage and rebooted the router (Note: Ping tests were passing):

May 22 20:35:08 DSL-AC68U-C110 (ChkWAN.sh): 27806 ***ERROR cURL 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MartineauUK/Chk-WAN/master/Test500B.txt' transfer FAILED RC=28
May 22 20:35:08 DSL-AC68U-C110 (ChkWAN.sh): 27806 v1.17 Monitoring WAN connection cURL data retrieval check FAILED
May 22 20:35:09 DSL-AC68U-C110 (ChkWAN.sh): 27806 Rebooting..... (Action=REBOOT)

It would be a good enhancement to this script if a capability is introduced to toggle bitswap variable first to regain internet connection, then try to restart WAN, then as a final action if any of the previous actions are not successful, to reboot the router.

 

[GNUton]

Hi There!
There is a new pre-release available for testing: 386.02_6-gnuton0_alpha1
The beef of this release is the WiFi frag attack patch.
Please give it a spin and let me know if you stumble across any issue with the WiFi on both AC68U AX82U.
Other important highlights are:
- DSL-AX82U I have merged the latest prebuilts
- Both models: re-merged the upstream code with all the SDK changes.

Please ping me if you see any regression.

The new images can be downloaded from here: https://github.com/gnuton/asuswrt-merlin.ng/releases/tag/386.02_6-gnuton0_alpha1
I am testing them too.

 

[Bluesky]

Hi There!
There is a new pre-release available for testing: 386.02_6-gnuton0_alpha1
The beef of this release is the WiFi frag attack patch.
Please give it a spin and let me know if you stumble across any issue with the WiFi on both AC68U AX82U.
Other important highlights are:
- DSL-AX82U I have merged the latest prebuilts
- Both models: re-merged the upstream code with all the SDK changes.

Please ping me if you see any regression.

The new images can be downloaded from here: https://github.com/gnuton/asuswrt-merlin.ng/releases/tag/386.02_6-gnuton0_alpha1
I am testing them too.

Hi my friend
In the new version 386.02_6 Alpha. Can't find my mobile IP address ،wirelessly, Recognized when I connected with the wire,and not work AiMesh

 

[my_bey]

It may still be your hardware failing and the only way I think you can rule that out is reinstalling a version of firmware that worked previously.

Completely random suggestion but I think I read posts about problems with an isp reassigning customer's wan IPs (assuming it's dynamic) causing disconnections that might be worth investigating.

Good luck and let us know how you get on.

A few days ago, I had a internet disconnection problem again. Rebooting did not solve the issue. I decided to revert to Asus stock firmware. I installed Firmware Version 3.0.0.4.386_43252. I could not connect to internet. So, I called the ISP. After a couple of hours later, they confirmed there was a general failure in the neighborhood. Next day, I had internet access again.

Since then, with the stock firmware, I had a few "outage" issues occurred. So, I don't know if the ISP or my router has the root cause. But for now, I plan to continue to use the Asus stock firmware for a while until a stable GNUton version is available.

As I posted before, to fix the outage issues, I was toggling the bitswap variable then clicking on "Apply" button on the GUI to reset and regain internet access. I realized that after an "outage" event occurs, I do not have to toggle bitswap variable. Just clicking on the apply button on the GUI without changing anything on the settings, causes my DSL modem to regain access to internet. FYI.

To knowledgeable people, my question is: What is the equivalent SSH command of clicking apply button on Administration, DSL Setting page of the GUI? A script would be helpful.

 

[GNUton]

@Bluesky I have notice that. I had to reset to factory to get the clients count working again.
DO NOT RESET TO FACTORY YET.
A new 386.02_6-gnuton0_alpha2 will be available in about 1 hour. Please try to flash that and let me know how it goes.

 

[GNUton]

386.02_6-gnuton0_alpha2 is now available for testing.
Please let me know if client count in the main page is zero and if AiMesh works.

 

[GNUton]

@my_bey IIRC the problem you had is not in the DSL connection itself since you are always connected to the internet.
The "outage" for you means that external clients cannot connect to your modem because the modem has changed IP and the DDNS is not in sync with the new IP.

So in order to force the DDNS service to re-fresh the IP you reset the DSL configuration to disconnect the router from the internet.
In order to disconnect the internet I guess you can use ifconfig to put down and up the wan interface.

If the issue from me described is the real problem, I would suggest you to review the DDNS setting or checking if a different DDNS provider would work better of double check if you have more than one DDNS updater in your network which are making a mess.

DDNS services

Third party firmware for Asus routers (newer codebase) - RMerl/asuswrt-merlin.ng

github.com