GT-AX11000 crash when PC wakes up....

[StephaneM]

Hi,

I'm having a weird issue for many months and I have failed to find a resolution so maybe the community here can help me with new ideas.

The issue is as the title : When I wake up my PC, the router crash and restart (there is a crash log though I can't see anything useful for me in it). Usually it crash once and when restarted I can use my PC and all is fine.

The weird thing is : it only does this if the router was freshly restarted (less than 24 hours). As I'm restarting the router every sunday morning, the issue only happen on sunday when I wake up my PC. If I wake it up from monday to saturday : nothing happen at all !!! (Unless I rebooted the router for a firmware update)

A week or two ago, the issue has stepped up : I woke up my PC and the router crashed, restarted, crashed, restarted until I unplugged the network cable of my PC... If I plug it back : it crash again.... The router finally loose its configuration and its mind, as it presented the setup page, but I was unable to either restore the configuration or setup the router without restoring (I had to hard reset the router to make it work again and restore its config).

While it was in "setup mode" : plug in back the ethernet of my PC made the router crash again...

I tried to update the driver of the PC network card (integrated Ethernet chipset Intel I219-V) or changing various properties for the network card (mostly related to power efficiency or states).

The PC is connected to a Netgear Gigabit switch (5 ports all occupied), this switch is then connected to the router, I also tried to change the port on the switch the PC is connected to.

This is the only machine that manage to crash the router. Otherwise the router is working great and I have no issues with it at all. I have no other network issue that I can think of...

The router firmware is always up to date, the PC is also up to date (it was a W10 PC, now it's on W11 and the issue is still there)

I will try to change the network cable, and eventually try to connect the PC to the network through a Wifi bridge (I do have a CISCO wifi network switch that connects on 5GHz to the router)

Has anyone encounter such an issue or have an idea as to why a routeur can hard crash like this ?

 

[L&LD]

The router is not in a good/known state. Rebooting the router on a schedule isn't a 'best methods' approach either.

From when are you restoring that saved backup config file? Previous to when it started doing this issue? Is this backup from the same router you're using now?

When was the last time you fully reset the router and then minimally and manually configured it? Without using a saved backup config file? And without 'blindly' changing settings that may have worked 'once upon a time'?

Why are you rebooting your router weekly? What purpose does that solve?

Is the router on a UPS?

I suggest you follow the applicable steps in the link below to get your router to a good/known state. And that includes not turning on any features or setting any options that are not absolutely required (like a weekly reboot).

Fully Reset / Best Practice Setup / More

 

[StephaneM]

The router is not in a good/known state. Rebooting the router on a schedule isn't a 'best methods' approach either.

I reboot the rooter on a weekly basis not because I was having issues regularly, but to avoid having issues ;-) This router replaced a RT AC68U that I needed to reboot on a weekly basis because of WAN load balancing (no matter what I had to reboot at some point on this router to regain Internet access). The GT one was not having issues at all with WAN load balancing and maybe started to misbehave after weeks / months of use. So I could run the GT without restarting it each week, it's a convenience as this way the router always work (well except the current issue)

From when are you restoring that saved backup config file? Previous to when it started doing this issue? Is this backup from the same router you're using now?

I have this router for yeas now, so I saved the config right after setting it up, so the saved config is years old and previous when the router started doing this. And the config is from this router.

When was the last time you fully reset the router and then minimally and manually configured it? Without using a saved backup config file? And without 'blindly' changing settings that may have worked 'once upon a time'?

I never reset the router, it was a brand new router. I set it up with only obvious settings : SSID / IP / Password / DHCP reservation / WAN settings. On the router itself I have not changed any settings "blindly". the only settings I "added" was DHCP option for the WAN connection (so that the router is directly connected to the Internet instead of using the ISP router then the ASUS router with double NAT setup)

Is the router on a UPS?

Yes it is.

To exclude any malware or bad software issue on my PC I connected a Wifi card (ASUS USB AC53) to my PC. When the PC is connected to the router this was, it doesn't crash the router when it wakes up...

So it's either the Ethernet port of the PC, or the IP / MAC of the PC that should be involved.

Another thing I spotted once in the logs : the router was complaining that it cannot use the 192.168.70.10 IP because it is in use elsewhere (this is true), the only thing is that the DHCP range is 192.168.70.21 to 192.168.70.254 (router IP is 192.168.70.20), and the 192.168.70.10 is not used in the DHCP reservation (IPs 192.168.70.1 to 192.168.70.19 are used on servers and statically assigned). So I was really puzzled when I saw this in logs, but never saw it since the first time I spotted it.

I'll report what happens when using the wireless switch : IP / MAC of the PC will be the same, but the router will see the PC as a wireless device and not any more as a wired device.

Of course I could wipe out the router and start the config from scratch, as it is really a pain to do this : I have 24 DHCP reservations, 80 devices and I renamed and assigned an icon for each of them and this is really time consuming to do this all over again (the ASUS UI is really slow)

 

[L&LD]

Yes, you really need to do a full reset and M&M config without using an ancient backup file from many firmware versions ago.

Rebooting the router on a weekly schedule is a perfect example of 'blindly' using old settings/methods which worked 'once upon a time'. This may even be the reason your router is no longer working as expected today.

Your last paragraph also hints to me that you're not using the router at its expected defaults (anymore). Versus when the router was brand new. Not only has the router changed with the firmware updates over the years, but so have your clients too.

Even when buying a brand-new router, a full reset is necessary in my experience. After flashing to the firmware, you want to use, then.

A full reset isn't a pain, nor is it time-consuming when you're experiencing problems (or for me, when I'm doing so for a customer and don't want to come back for silly reasons). Rather, it ensures that the router is in a good/known state and the router should 'just work'. If it doesn't, more than likely it is a hardware issue at that point, (if a quick search of the symptoms doesn't reveal the fix, of course).

Fully Reset Router and Network

 

[StephaneM]

I have take a look at the .CFG file and I can see that it's really a nvram dump. So yes, restoring a config doesn't restore only the things we change on the router from the default settings, but instead it restore every single thing there is you can and cannot change in the UI... Well I surely wouldn't have done it this way.

I'll do a wipe out when I'll have nothing else to do, though I'm wondering if I could create a .CFG file with only the settings I don't want to setup manually again on the router, so it's the DHCP reservation list and the custom hardware list. Both of these are clearly in the .CFG file. From what I can see the restore only does nvram_set (and nvram_unset if the supplied setting value is null). So it should work this way...

Though I'm not sure wiping out the router will fix my issue (If I remember correctly, after wiping it out when it lost its config, it was still crashing when my PC was connected, but I may be wrong, the only thing I'm 100% sure is that it was still crashing when it lost its config and before I hard reset it)

 

[ColinTaylor]

Another user reported the same problem with a different Asus router. As it only happened with one specific PC using one specific network card the card was presumed to be to blame (it was an old card). Eventually the card was replaced with something more modern and there were no more occurrences of the problem.