Problems with ASUS RT-AC87R with fw 380.68

[Darf Nader]

I have lately been having a lot of issues, particularly where the router just keels over for no clear reason and then takes about 6 minutes for it to boot and come back to life. I would like to say this started when I started to use OpenVPN client directly on the router to keep a VPN connection up, but it has been going on long before this. Sometimes, the problem manifests where the admin console "half loads" the page elements and then spins forever. Sometimes a reload helps- sometimes not, but this bad GUI behavior seems like an ongoing problem along wth the random reboots.

The last time the router keeled over it was right after cron kicked off a job to restart the VPN client which I presume it does in case the client has stopped for some reason. The last entries were:

Sep 8 16:18:00 crond[490]: USER mlitwin pid 405 cmd service start_vpnserver1
Sep 8 16:18:00 rc_service: service 406:notify_rc start_vpnserver1
Sep 8 16:18:00 syslog: VPN_LOG_NOTE: 687: VPN Server 1 already running...

And then the next entries in syslog were dated July 31 as it was going through initial startup process and had the wrong date until ntpd started. The outage appears to have lasted about 6 minutes before it was taking traffic again. (The logs show this as well.)

There are a few things that seem like they might be off. For one the root disk is completely full! Not /jffs mind you but / which maps to /dev/root. I am assuming this is not normal and that I should (a) clear off space and (b) find out why root would be allowed to fill up like this.

Second, I am seeing an occurrence of this every hour on the hour:
Sep 8 16:15:29 cstats[500]: Problem loading /jffs. Still trying...
Sep 8 16:15:40 rstats[502]: Problem loading /jffs. Still trying...

I have been using DD-WRT on this router for about a year now and it seems like things have been steadily degrading. I actually did a complete reinstall of the firmware after resetting to factory configs hoping this would clear things up, but it didn't help. I am not sure where else to look or what log level I should bump it up to see if I can better capture what is happening when it deep-sixes. Also, I am wondering if root being full is a red herring or not. Maybe it's supposed to be this way as the volatile storage is in /jffs? It's been so long since I ssh'd to this router I forgot how things are supposed to look.

Any tips on how I could troubleshoot this would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Darf

 

[JoeFrat]

I have been experiencing random reboots as well, since about 378.52. I believe mine is related to the AI controls as I have them turned on to keep my kid off the internet all night since school has restarted. Over the summer, I didn't have any reboots besides the firmware update as AI was turned off. A quick search shows random reboots to be a problem talked about earlier this year, and no real solutions other than bad hardware or turn off services.

I'm going to try and turn off AI for the week and see if that fixes it. Maybe try and disable the services for a few days to see if that helps you?