NVRAM still high after factory reset

[Rockel83]

I have the Asus RT-AC68U with Merlin WRT for a while now. And this router and firmware is really awsome.

I've configured all devices with MAC reserverd IP's. And this is going fast with home automation!

There're about 22 devices connected this way all the time.

But I had some troubles connecting a new Photocamera lately. Thought it was the camera itself at first.
But turned out that my NVRAM was almost full. Even got a warning in Merlin.

Almost the full amount of 65.000 kb was in use, what caused the connection problem of new devices (as it seemed).

So searched the internet and i've found some threads about cleaning the NVRAM using SSH. But also threads of doing a factory reset.

Whe I do a factory reset, NVRAM is redused to about 50.000 out of 65.000 kb.
Wich leaves only 15.000 kb.

When setting up everything again it reaches about 60.000 kb again.

Is this normal? Or is there a way to clean this NVRAM further to lower vallues?
50.000 kb sounds a bit big for firmware only...

 

[ColinTaylor]

~60,000 bytes used is perfectly normal.

 

[Rockel83]

~60,000 bytes used is perfectly normal.

Thanks for your support!


Never looked at it, until I got the warnings.
Means I only have around 5.000 kb left on a clean install, which looks not that big annymore in these times...

But a little bit of tekst (ip's/mac's etc.) Won't take much space either I suppose...

 

[Martinski]

...
Means I only have around 5.000 kb left on a clean install, which looks not that big annymore in these times...

WRT NVRAM, to get a few more bytes free you might want to remove some of the unused/obsolete entries per RMerlin's 3rd bullet point in the 2nd post of the following link to the "384.10 Release" thread:

[Release] Asuswrt-Merlin 384.10 is now available

Asuswrt-Merlin 384.10 is now available for all supported models. The focus of this release was the partial migration to OpenSSL 1.1.1 (not all services can be migrated by me, as some would require Asus to recompile them against OpenSSL 1.1.1). April 3rd 2019:: 384.10_2 is now available...

www.snbforums.com

When you're running out of NVRAM space, a few more free bytes count.

 

[Martinski]

...
I've configured all devices with MAC reserverd IP's. And this is going fast with home automation!

There're about 22 devices connected this way all the time.

When your number of client devices in your LAN with manually reserved IP addresses starts to get large, I think it's time to start looking into using the "dnsmasq.conf.add" custom config file as a way to add all your client devices to the DHCP Server IP Reservation list. Doing this will avoid using NVRAM storage.

If interested in using this method search for "dnsmasq.conf.add" in this forum to find many threads discussing its usage.

 

[Rockel83]

When your number of client devices in your LAN with manually reserved IP addresses starts to get large, I think it's time to start looking into using the "dnsmasq.conf.add" custom config file as a way to add all your client devices to the DHCP Server IP Reservation list. Doing this will avoid using NVRAM storage.

If interested in using this method search for "dnsmasq.conf.add" in this forum to find many threads discussing its usage.

Thanks for you help. Maybe this could be a sollution yes. Just did a quick search for it.

But I've bought myself a new AC86U in a Verry sharp black friday deal ladt week. It has twice the amount of NVRAM, so i would be good for a while now. I could play around with this AC68U a bit now to achieve this or place it in AiMesh with the new one.