Nat loopback and qos not working

[Noremacyug]

Title sums it up. Unless I'm missing an enable switch, nat loopback is not working for me. Also qos does absolutely nothing. I've tried the stock firmware as well and the qos doesn't work there either. The only qos that I've had work, and work very well was tomato shibby. However, I think it was having a few probs dropping wifi from time to time, so I came back to stock/Merlin. I'd really like to get the stock or Merlin's to work for me, but no qos or nat loopback really sucks. Everything else looks to be functional. If I can't get it sorted, I'll just put the thing in wap mode and sit it behind a smoothwall or pfsense box.

Version I have flashed is 374.41

Thanks in advance to anyone with suggestions and thanks to Merlin for the hard work.

 

[RMerlin]

NAT loopback is working fine.

I did not specifically test QoS lately, but no reason to think it wouldn't be working any more as that code hasn't changed in months.

 

[Noremacyug]

Ok. Get this crap. You saying that nat loopback works made me wonder if qos was affecting it somehow. Turned qos off and back on and now loopback works fine for me now. Of coarse qos is still borked. One thing that seems messed up on the qos is the high/low limits. I have a 6Mb down connection. For the heck of it I set the down limit to 3Mb to see if it had any effect. I noticed that when downloading a file from usenet that it was still downloading at ~490KBps. Unless I'm thinking incorrectly, or misunderstanding it should have been capped at ~380KBps.

(Edit) - after altering a setting in the qos menu and applying, loopback stopped working again.

 

[RMerlin]

Ok. Get this crap. You saying that nat loopback works made me wonder if qos was affecting it somehow. Turned qos off and back on and now loopback works fine for me now. Of coarse qos is still borked. One thing that seems messed up on the qos is the high/low limits. I have a 6Mb down connection. For the heck of it I set the down limit to 3Mb to see if it had any effect. I noticed that when downloading a file from usenet that it was still downloading at ~490KBps. Unless I'm thinking incorrectly, or misunderstanding it should have been capped at ~380KBps.

(Edit) - after altering a setting in the qos menu and applying, loopback stopped working again.

There could be a conflict between QoS and NAT loopback since they both rely on packet marking. I'll take a look in the next few days to see if I can reproduce it

For QoS, keep in mind that it works as a traffic shaper, not as a bandwidth limiter. The values you enter are only used to calculate the percentages in the other fields below. Also, a given rule only kicks in if there is nothing else with a higher priority requiring that bandwidth. So for example, if you give a low priority to FTP, that FTP will run at full speed until you have a large HTTP download occurring (assuming the default where HTTP is a higher priority).

It's been a long time since I've actually tested QoS as I don't need it, but I remember being able to reproduce this behaviour.

Overall, Asuswrt's QoS isn't as flexible or intuitive as Tomato's - I totally agree.

 

[RMerlin]

BTW, need to know which router model this is. MIPS and ARM devices use a different version of iptables, so they can exhibit different behaviour.

 

[Noremacyug]

It's a rt-ac66r.

I have my priorities as you mentioned and expected the results you stated. I set usenet to lowest priority and then created a rule for web traffic with medium priority. After starting a download on usenet and maxing out the downstream, my web traffic suffered. YouTube streams would drop to 240p/144p to try to keep playing.

 

[janosek]

...NAT loopback also not working when openvpn client enabled

Also on the RT-AC66U .41, NAT loopback stops working when an openvpn client is enabled. The added wrinkle is selective routing, however.

 

[mylle]

NAT loopback is not working for me either

RT-N66U latest version

 

[Grump]

It's a rt-ac66r.

I have my priorities as you mentioned and expected the results you stated. I set usenet to lowest priority and then created a rule for web traffic with medium priority. After starting a download on usenet and maxing out the downstream, my web traffic suffered. YouTube streams would drop to 240p/144p to try to keep playing.

QoS on downstream is difficult, because the traffic is already arriving at your router (and saturating your connection) before it decides its time to prioritize. Dropping the traffic after it comes down the pipe won't make the pipe any bigger. It does it's best to pre-emptively throttle, but it's not very reliable. I had to set my downstream limits to 35% to knock 5meg off my 45meg connection.

On the bright side, QoS on the upstream works swimingly.

 

[Noremacyug]

QoS on downstream is difficult, because the traffic is already arriving at your router (and saturating your connection) before it decides its time to prioritize. Dropping the traffic after it comes down the pipe won't make the pipe any bigger. It does it's best to pre-emptively throttle, but it's not very reliable. I had to set my downstream limits to 35% to knock 5meg off my 45meg connection.



On the bright side, QoS on the upstream works swimingly.

Ha. I don't have but 6meg to work with, wish I had 45. I just ended up tossing it in WAP mode, loading up ipfire on a little mini-itx box and turned it loose. It's working great. My line has been saturated for the past week from downloads, literally 24/7. But it has not hindered my browsing or YouTube/etc experience. The qos on there works great. Kinda hate that I have to run another box to achieve what I want, but I get some extra features in doing so; namely adblocking and a cache proxy. Loving it.