Hi,
I know that AC86U and AC68U are now EOL, but I wanted to report the issue anyway, just in case it might also affect other devices.
Friends of mine have an AIMesh setup, which I maintain.
The setup is:
AC86U (main)
3 AC86U nodes (2 of them connected via cable to each other, connection to main is Wifi only)
2 AC68U nodes (usually) connected via Wifi to one of the AC86U nodes
For the last 1-2 years, I had the latest Merlin-Firmware installed on all devices and did regular updates, when available.
Disclaimer: I am not sure whether the issues I faced were due to the mesh setup, but I suppose if not, people would have reported issues in masses.
As far as I remember, the AC68Us always ran stably.
The AC86Us on the other hand were very unstable in that setup.
The (lan-connected) main router's UI regularly stopped working (endless loading until timeout), sometimes even minutes to hours after a reboot.
It was still possible to SSH into it and remotely restart the router, so I initially assumed that the UI issue was due to some issue with my VPN until I got confirmation that the UI did not work within the LAN either.
The AC86U nodes regularly dropped out of the mesh and stayed unconnected, so that manually switching off and power-on was needed to revive them.
Obviously, due to them being disconnected to the mesh, SSHing and remotely rebooting was not possible.
As a result, the whole mesh more or less broke down completely every few days (at least once a week, but usually twice a week).
The issue was not that critical until two months ago, when we extended the mesh with the AC68Us, of which one is used to connect some IP cameras for observing the sheep's barn. Right now is lambing season and my friends need to check multiple times per night if everything is ok... which is not possible, if the AC86U to which the AC68U is connected went down...
I tried to work around this issue by scheduling a reboot every night, but it did not solve the issue.
I observed that the scheduled reboot did not execute reliably, supposedly (not sure here, but assuming) in cases, where the main router was somehow in a messed-up state.
If a scheduled reboot did not work, it did not on all routers - I assume rebooting the nodes might be triggered by the main router.
It also looked like rebooting did not just skip one day and continued the next... when rebooting stopped working, a cold-start of the device(s) was needed to make it functional again.
Long story short, that setup with AsusWRT Merlin ran absolutely unstable for months and months, but I did not relate that to AsusWRT Merlin in the first place.
Last week, I reverted all routers to the latest stock firmware and also disabled the scheduled reboot to increase the chances of failure but until now, everything runs rock-solid.
It is fair to say that it might need some more days to be really certain, but usually, the mesh network would not have survived 3-5 days without complete failure.
I wanted to report this here, since my observations might help with stabilizing the software, even if only on newer devices.
Best
Markus
I know that AC86U and AC68U are now EOL, but I wanted to report the issue anyway, just in case it might also affect other devices.
Friends of mine have an AIMesh setup, which I maintain.
The setup is:
AC86U (main)
3 AC86U nodes (2 of them connected via cable to each other, connection to main is Wifi only)
2 AC68U nodes (usually) connected via Wifi to one of the AC86U nodes
For the last 1-2 years, I had the latest Merlin-Firmware installed on all devices and did regular updates, when available.
Disclaimer: I am not sure whether the issues I faced were due to the mesh setup, but I suppose if not, people would have reported issues in masses.
As far as I remember, the AC68Us always ran stably.
The AC86Us on the other hand were very unstable in that setup.
The (lan-connected) main router's UI regularly stopped working (endless loading until timeout), sometimes even minutes to hours after a reboot.
It was still possible to SSH into it and remotely restart the router, so I initially assumed that the UI issue was due to some issue with my VPN until I got confirmation that the UI did not work within the LAN either.
The AC86U nodes regularly dropped out of the mesh and stayed unconnected, so that manually switching off and power-on was needed to revive them.
Obviously, due to them being disconnected to the mesh, SSHing and remotely rebooting was not possible.
As a result, the whole mesh more or less broke down completely every few days (at least once a week, but usually twice a week).
The issue was not that critical until two months ago, when we extended the mesh with the AC68Us, of which one is used to connect some IP cameras for observing the sheep's barn. Right now is lambing season and my friends need to check multiple times per night if everything is ok... which is not possible, if the AC86U to which the AC68U is connected went down...
I tried to work around this issue by scheduling a reboot every night, but it did not solve the issue.
I observed that the scheduled reboot did not execute reliably, supposedly (not sure here, but assuming) in cases, where the main router was somehow in a messed-up state.
If a scheduled reboot did not work, it did not on all routers - I assume rebooting the nodes might be triggered by the main router.
It also looked like rebooting did not just skip one day and continued the next... when rebooting stopped working, a cold-start of the device(s) was needed to make it functional again.
Long story short, that setup with AsusWRT Merlin ran absolutely unstable for months and months, but I did not relate that to AsusWRT Merlin in the first place.
Last week, I reverted all routers to the latest stock firmware and also disabled the scheduled reboot to increase the chances of failure but until now, everything runs rock-solid.
It is fair to say that it might need some more days to be really certain, but usually, the mesh network would not have survived 3-5 days without complete failure.
I wanted to report this here, since my observations might help with stabilizing the software, even if only on newer devices.
Best
Markus
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