How often do you guys reboot?

[sfx2000]

Agreed. But why does simple logic have to go out the window when trying to use pfSense?

there's a rhyme and a reason for why pfSense and OpenWRT is configured - and much of this goes beyond the base home based Router/AP...

Much more options to look at, and that adds complexity for all - those that do networking for a living, it's pretty straight forward, but for Joe Six-Pack wanting a turn-key gateway, there's more than a few opportunities to shoot oneself in the foot many times over...

 

[L&LD]

Are there any real manuals for pfSense out there? And not the pfSense manual itself - that is simply atrocious.

Like defining a term using the word you're supposed to be defining. Ugh.

I'm asking for something of how pfSense is laid out 'under the hood'. That would be a start to understanding it.

 

[sfx2000]

Getting back on topic here...

Once one has a config that works - leave it alone - update for security perhaps if circumstances mandate it.

I've seen posts where AsusWRT has been up perhaps longer than it should be - bypassing needed updates for security there.

 

[roadwrenchtech]

I deployed a new 86u at a customers house just over a week ago. Latest factory firmware. Sometime early yesterday morning it dumped most of the wifi clients. We did have electrical storms around that same time so I hoped maybe power went off-on-off just right to mess up a boot sequence. My phone grabbed the network when I pulled in the driveway and had internet. Did first reboot in about 8 days and everything but customers phone came back, which had to have the password reentered to connect. My first venture with asus routers and this one bit me in the butt already. We'll see how long she flies this time.

 

[L&LD]

I deployed a new 86u at a customers house just over a week ago. Latest factory firmware. Sometime early yesterday morning it dumped most of the wifi clients. We did have electrical storms around that same time so I hoped maybe power went off-on-off just right to mess up a boot sequence. My phone grabbed the network when I pulled in the driveway and had internet. Did first reboot in about 8 days and everything but customers phone came back, which had to have the password reentered to connect. My first venture with asus routers and this one bit me in the butt already. We'll see how long she flies this time.

Not the routers fault here. A good UPS is what I always recommend to customers and most of them listen too.

 

[roadwrenchtech]

Not the routers fault here. A good UPS is what I always recommend to customers and most of them listen too.

The ups among other things is on my wish list for this customer, have to build in increments as they approve more purchases. None of the clocks were blinking on anything, but a blip, or emf surge from a nearby strike may be to blame too.

 

[Elmer]

AC88: Had no problems (and no need to reboot) until I did two things simultaneously (stupid me); I upgraded to 384.9 and installed amtm with diversion and dnscrypt enabled. Started having periodic crashes every three days or so. Logs would show the last line being a dnsmasq request - nothing else. I've since updated to 384.10 beta (saw it had a dnsmasq update) and so far so good. I have a gut feeling dnscryrt is a problem, but I made too many changes to put my finger on the cause.

 

[martinr]

AC88: .....I have a gut feeling dnscryrt is a problem, but I made too many changes to put my finger on the cause.

You may well be right: I installed dnscrypt on my RT-AC68U snd it ran fine for about 6 weeks, but then I “lost the Internet”. I can’t remember exactly what happened but it went from bad to worse. I seem to remember I couldn’t even access the webui - my router IP address wasn’t resolved. Factory reset and did not reinstall DNSCrypt. But I accept that many people run it without so much as a hiccup and tgey’re perfectly happy with it.

 

[YGator]

I use to leave my router up and running, but since getting the RT-AC86U and running Merlin I have seen some issues. Once it showed not connected to the Internet when it was. Also it seems like just after a day or so after a reboot Aiprotection does not show any activity. I believe both of these s are ASUS bugs. I was just rebooting manually when I remember, but just last night I set scheduled reboot for 5:55 AM everyday. Well I woke up today with a voice mail saying my network was down and sure enough the router did not come back up when it did the schedule reboot. So I am back to manually rebooting for now.

 

[Ramz]

I bought the AC 86u router. I unpacked it and upgraded to the Merlin firmware at the time. Now I have never done a Factory reset ever and was wondering if I should have? any thoughts?

 

[L&LD]

I bought the AC 86u router. I unpacked it and upgraded to the Merlin firmware at the time. Now I have never done a Factory reset ever and was wondering if I should have? any thoughts?

If you're not having any issues, glitches or bugs, then continue on!

However, if you do get anything funky going on, particularly if it seems to hit your network out of left field and no one else is experiencing anything similar, a full M&M Config is needed then.

See the links below in my signature for more in-depth info.

 

[L&LD]

I use to leave my router up and running, but since getting the RT-AC86U and running Merlin I have seen some issues. Once it showed not connected to the Internet when it was. Also it seems like just after a day or so after a reboot Aiprotection does not show any activity. I believe both of these s are ASUS bugs. I was just rebooting manually when I remember, but just last night I set scheduled reboot for 5:55 AM everyday. Well I woke up today with a voice mail saying my network was down and sure enough the router did not come back up when it did the schedule reboot. So I am back to manually rebooting for now.

Have you performed a full reset to factory defaults followed by a minimal and manual configuration of the router to secure it and connect to your ISP?

(I would also suggest making sure the jffs partition was freshly formatted too).

If you haven't, now is the time to do so if you want a more stable networking experience, without the need to reboot on a schedule too (that is just masking another problem).

 

[Zonkd]

I use to leave my router up and running, but since getting the RT-AC86U and running Merlin I have seen some issues. Once it showed not connected to the Internet when it was. Also it seems like just after a day or so after a reboot Aiprotection does not show any activity. I believe both of these s are ASUS bugs. I was just rebooting manually when I remember, but just last night I set scheduled reboot for 5:55 AM everyday. Well I woke up today with a voice mail saying my network was down and sure enough the router did not come back up when it did the schedule reboot. So I am back to manually rebooting for now.

You received a voice mail alert? Like some fancy robo-call? Or just family demanding you get their internet back?

 

[martinr]

You received a voice mail alert? Like some fancy robo-call? Or just family demanding you get their internet back?

I think it’s Merlin. When you enable network monitoring, if your network goes down, it flashes on Merlin’s screen and he phones you to let you know. At least, that’s what I think network monitoring does.

 

[underdose]

Everyday, several times because I like to push my 'White Knight' to its limits and when I change some settings which normally doesn't need a reboot, need a reboot on my config. For example if I change any value in the Administration page, radvd (ipv6 6in4 tunnel component) starts to throw out errors and only a reboot solves this.

Everything appears normal, the lights are normal, devices connect to the router normally, but there is no internet.

I have that too, in a spesific condition: when I stream a torrent (with Soda Player), after a couple of minutes every device on the network loses internet connection. I assume that's about either QoS or firewall rules but couldn't find out what the exact reason is, yet.

My setup is:
- RT-N66W on John's Fork
- Overclocked to 662MHz
- Using ipv6 with a tunnel (6in4)
- DoT Enabled
- QoS Enabled
- Diversion + Pixelserv-tls installed
- PeerGuardian3 with 6 country ip block lists
- 5 unnecessary services/processes (u2ec, lpd etc.) killed/stopped at boot time
- DFS Channels Enabled

 

[MikeInNJ]

Fair enough. I'll follow-up in here after I get started. I do wonder why L&LD suggests changing the SSIDs?

I'm curious about this as well. Why change the SSIDs?

 

[L&LD]

I'm curious about this as well. Why change the SSIDs?

See my links in my signature below for (possibly) more details.

But the main reason I recommend to change SSID's is to create a new connection with each connected client device which forces the proper options and microcode optimizations to be used by both sides of the connection.

This is most important when doing a full M&M Config, IMO and is part of a network 'sanitize' for me. But can also be used on its own before an M&M Config to see if this was the reason for any issue(s), bugs/glitches all along.

While the password can be reused, I don't recommend it (part of a 'sanitize' network, for me).

In any case, I currently recommend an SSID of at least 8 characters, starting with a letter and with no spaces or other special characters either (I don't use dashes (-) or underscores ( _ ) ), and definitely no smiley faces.

The password is at least 16 characters, with all the same restrictions as above, except that I haven't noticed numbers being an issue if they happened to be the first character(s) used.

 

[58chev]

Maybe my wife has a point when she demands to know why I’m tinkering with the router whereas no-one else she knows ever has any problems with their routers?

For this reason, my wife has her own router, her and a printer on that network.

No more complaints from her when I have to play with scripts or upgrade/downgrade FW.

 

[Allan Marcus]

why? is it really needed or do you not trust the router and think it will "blow up" on its own. I used to run an R7000 on Shibby Tomato with an uptime of 122 days without a single issue. But maybe you have other reasons. Not here to tell you what to do, just curious why you reboot it daily

CyberSecurity. Way back in 2018 the bad guys got into home routers. They hung out in RAM. Rebooting the router effectively kicked them out. Rebooting at 5am daily (I do this too) reduces time memory resident malware can run.

 

[eibgrad]

Can't agree more w/ @L&LD. Whenever you update the router firmware, *always* do a factory reset on the router. Doesn't matter if it's the same firmware (merlin to merlin), or different firmware (oem to merlin). I've seen my share of crazy problems caused by failing to include this final step in the update process.

Because I'm always fiddling w/ my router, often to debug user problems here and on other forums (!), it varies a lot how long my router will run before I need to reboot it (but not because it's lost the internet connection).

A few years ago, I did have a problem w/ dropped connections though, when my router failed to keep the correct time. The internal clock always ran 13 mins too slow, per hour. Over the period of the ISP's DHCP lease, it would lose so much time that eventually the DHCP lease would expire *before* the router knew enough to renew it! So the lease would expire, my router did nothing (as far as it was concerned, the lease was still valid), and I had no internet. Eventually I fixed it by updating the time on regular intervals, like every 10-20 mins. The better option would have been to replace the router, but at the time, I had to make do.