New ASUS ZenWiFi ET8 with Wifi 6E

[opq]

Yeah, our new ET8 system is resetting approx every 10-12 hours. Super inconvenient. We are using a stock setup with the 2 nodes from the box. The only customizations we’ve done are to set our own class B IP range and to set some DHCP reservations to make the transition to the new system as seamless as possible.

No FW updates yet, guess we’ll use the scheduled reboot feature for now…

 

[nicholb]

I've noticed that when it goes out the web admin says that the ISP's DHCP is not working properly. The lease is 12h so it could be that the ET8 is failing it's DHCP refreshes.

 

[opq]

Ah interesting, and yeah you said you tried changing the WAN DHCP lease settings too… ugh. new adopter woes I guess.

 

[opq]

I just checked, my WAN dhcp lease is 1 day, so it must be something else. Nothing in the system log prior to the reboot and date being changed back to May 4

 

[nicholb]

Today, my issue appears to have mixed causes. I switched back to the Orbi to get some stability and was still getting drop outs. Called Spectrum and the recording said my area is having intermittent issues with web outages (or something like that).

Makes it real difficult to troubleshoot when your ISP is also having problems.

UPDATE: Called them again and the automated message was gone but was still having outages. They could see my line is having a problem so are sending a tech out on Saturday. So no more ET8 troubleshooting until Spectrum fixes the line. Hopefully they were the primary cause.

 

[opq]

I think we’ve found the cause of our reboots… I haven’t made any settings changes since the last reboot. I wonder if the way the firmware saves any settings changes isn’t done properly right now, and it eventually leads to a crash. we’re coming up to 24 hours and no reboots so far. Haven’t done anything else or anything differently other than not changing any settings..

 

[opq]

With that issue solved comes the issue of a portion of our phones and tablets losing WiFi and not being able to connect, even after restarting the clients. Nothing in the system log on the Zenwifi, but a reboot of the routers solved it.. ugh.

 

[nicholb]

With that issue solved comes the issue of a portion of our phones and tablets losing WiFi and not being able to connect, even after restarting the clients. Nothing in the system log on the Zenwifi, but a reboot of the routers solved it.. ugh.

I have not seen that. All devices have had no problems connecting. The include a couple iPads, Samsung S21 phones and a Samsung Tablet.

 

[JagoUK]

We upgraded to the ET8 recently and here are a few things that helped:

increasing the dwell time and trigger conditions for switching between the bands. For some reason the et8 defaults are much more sensitive than previous.

Disabling “roaming assistant” has significantly improved the stability for us. There used to be frequent disconnect-reconnects but no more. iOS devices seem to be pretty good about moving between nodes even without the Asus roaming assistant.

As for remaining issues.. we seem to be getting random router reboots followed by the clock being reset to May 4? i can’t tell whats causing what but a few times now I notice the clock being reset back to May 4 and our wifi going away for a few minutes… I guess the ET8 firmware is only on its initial release…

Date on reboot always goes back to a predefined date then updates while booting.

 

[nicholb]

Update: ISP found the signal strength to the modem was borderline and did some magic to improve it. The frequent drops seem to have stopped so that rather than the router was probably the main or only cause. Sorry for the false alarm. The coincidence of the ISP starting to have problems at the same time as installing a new router made me suspect the wrong cause.

 

[JagoUK]

Update: ISP found the signal strength to the modem was borderline and did some magic to improve it. The frequent drops seem to have stopped so that rather than the router was probably the main or only cause. Sorry for the false alarm. The coincidence of the ISP starting to have problems at the same time as installing a new router made me suspect the wrong cause.

I don't suppose you moved the modem or added an extension to the modem when installing your new kit?
I've done that before not thinking about it and cut my performance on ADSL in half.
Always put extensions in on lan side of modem

 

[nicholb]

I don't suppose you moved the modem or added an extension to the modem when installing your new kit?
I've done that before not thinking about it and cut my performance on ADSL in half.
Always put extensions in on lan side of modem

Nope, the tech thinks it was probably just some work or new installs in the neighborhood.

 

[nicholb]

Update: the ISP signal strength looks like it was the cause of the internet drops. Too bad it started at the same time I installed the ET8. Spent way to long trying to troubleshoot that.

Only remaining negative with the ET8 is that my Nest cams occasionally drop offline and then come back several minutes later.

 

[opq]

Without touching any of the settings, the Zenwifi is now going down and auto rebooting several times one afternoon. Ugh.

 

[jgebel]

Without touching any of the settings, the Zenwifi is now going down and auto rebooting several times one afternoon. Ugh.

My experience with the ET8 has been very positive so far. In fact, it has been rock solid now for 34 days. I use default settings.

 

[jpthsd]

Setting a static IP won't work. I did notice devices continued to work when the web admin showed Internet down, but my ISP almost immediately switched my IP to one in a different subnet and everything went down until I switched back to DHCP on the WAN.

I did try setting DHCP from the default of aggressive to normal. Ultimately it'll probably take a firmware update to fix. Reaching the end of wife acceptance so I may be forced to put the Orbi back in even though the current firmware also has a bug that causes DNS to fail, but it's dropouts are at least less frequent.

Yes it works, you need to set the preservation match with the AiMesh node's 5Ghz MAC address, when the AiMesh node establishes the Wireless Backhaul connection, the router would give that IP to the AiMesh node to use! I configured my AiMesh node with that!

 

[nicholb]

Yes it works, you need to set the preservation match with the AiMesh node's 5Ghz MAC address, when the AiMesh node establishes the Wireless Backhaul connection, the router would give that IP to the AiMesh node to use! I configured my AiMesh node with that!

I was talking about a static IP on the router itself (the one it uses for the ISP), not reserving them for the local network. In my case the ISP was changing the IP it was expecting my router to be using. Ended up not being the issue anyway.

 

[nicholb]

Without touching any of the settings, the Zenwifi is now going down and auto rebooting several times one afternoon. Ugh.

Had one of these reboots today. The router uptime indicates it rebooted as well as the log.

 

[nicholb]

It rebooted again today. opq, does yours also drop to using the 5Ghz band for backhaul when it does one of these reboots? Doing an actual reboot from the menu puts it back to 6Ghz backhaul.

 

[opq]

It rebooted again today. opq, does yours also drop to using the 5Ghz band for backhaul when it does one of these reboots? Doing an actual reboot from the menu puts it back to 6Ghz backhaul.

I’ve been using a wired backhaul since the beginning. I think the more I tinker with the web admin panel the more likely it crashes. If I don’t touch it them maybe 1-2 reboots a day.

Right before the system reboots, I noticed on the main web admin page the number of clients show 0 and the AiMesh page also stops showing any nodes and clients. But the clients still seem to be able to connect to the Internet.