Questions about rmerlin on ASUS RT-AC5300

[TreeMan]

I am having an issue with port forwarding not working in the stock Asus firmware. I was going to try dd-wrt but someone in their forum says the LAN ports on this router don't work in dd-wrt. So my questions are:

Will rmerlin allow port forwarding to work on the RT-AC5300 (allowing me to open a port for connections from the Internet and forward that traffic to a specific device on the local network)?

Do the LAN ports work okay?

Does WiFi work okay, or are there any noticeable issues with decreased range or throughput?

And assuming it would work okay, do you just install it as if you were installing an upgrade of the factory firmware from the Asus firmware page where you do updates, or are there preparatory steps that need to be taken first?

Thank you for any assistance. I'm assuming this is the correct download link: https://sourceforge.net/projects/asuswrt-merlin/files/RT-AC5300/ ?

 

[Jay Culley]

I have a 5300 and love asuswrt-merlin. Everything works fine. I am running the latest 380.65 with the latest Entware-NG. I have it setup for the extended ipset info, works great.

 

[TreeMan]

I have a 5300 and love asuswrt-merlin. Everything works fine. I am running the latest 380.65 with the latest Entware-NG. I have it setup for the extended ipset info, works great.

Thanks, but...

What is "the latest Entware-NG"?

What is "the extended ipset info"?

And, can you please tell me how you installed it?

 

[Jay Culley]

There is one file you upload with a .trx extension, you load it just like stock fw. Entware is a software repository that lets you add software to your router. The extended ipset, or traffic monitoring is a feature of merlin that captures extra traffic history.

website: https://asuswrt.lostrealm.ca/
docs https://github.com/RMerl/asuswrt-merlin/wiki

 

[TreeMan]

Thank you. So if you only plan to use the router as a router, and not run additional software on it, I'm assuming you don't need Entware, and if you're not trying to capture extra traffic history then you don't need ipset, which is good because right now I would not know how to install either.

As I alluded to in my first post, the only reason I'm even considering using something other than the factory firmware was so that I could open a port to a Raspberry Pi, which will actually be used as a SSH tunnel to another Windows-based device on the network, so I can run VNC through the tunnel. For some reason the factory firmware doesn't allow port forwarding, even though the interface appears to support it - it's a bug, apparently. While I suppose it might be possible to set up the SSH tunnel in the router itself, that seems less secure to me, because I only want one single external IP address to be able to access the tunnel, and for it to silently drop any connection attempts from any other IP address. So on the Raspberry Pi I have installed Webmin, which makes it much easier for someone who doesn't have a lot of proficiency in Linux to set up iptables, as well as change the ssh port to something other than default port 22.

Before anyone asks, my concerns about setting up the SSH tunnel on the router itself would be that first, I'd be a little afraid that in the process of doing so I might "break" the router beyond my ability to fix it (misconfigure it so I could not get in to make any further changes), second, that it would not be secure and that I might inadvertently leave an opening that could be exploited, particularly since I have no idea how to set up iptables without using something like Webmin or another GUI-based configuration utility, and third, that the overhead of encryption/decryption for the ssh tunnel would slow down the router for other connections. So unless Entware lets you add Webmin (or a similar GUI-based iptables setup and configuration utility) and maybe Midnight Commander, I don't think it would help me much, and I'd still be worried about the ssh overhead. On a Raspberry Pi I'm in a slightly more familiar environment and if I seriously break something there, I just have to re-flash the SD card and start over.

 

[Jay Culley]

I don't know man, port forwarding works for me, stock and merlin. Just go into WAN > Virtual Server / Port forwarding, turn it on and create the rule.

 

[TreeMan]

Well it seems there was another release of the stock firmware this week, and it appears to have fixed the port forwarding issue. So maybe it was just one bad firmware release, I don't know. Thanks for all the help and information.

 

[Craig Pamment]

Hey guys, I'm having issues with port forwarding on my RT-AC5300 also. I have tried stock firmware and Merlin and no luck with either. @TreeMan, did you get yours working?