[Release] Asuswrt-Merlin 380.65 is now available

[Naftali Oziel]

I compiled 380.65_4 late last night, but didn't have the time to run any tests before heading to bed. I uploaded them all on the Test_Builds folder, so if you guys could test it out for me, I'd really appreciate it (spare time is still limited here. Long story short - I'm in the final stages of taking over the company for which I had been working for the last 18 years, so that's a lot of things to deal with these days.)

What I need tested specifically:

RT-AC3200: make sure that wifi and Ethernet remains stable, unlike with 380.65_2 (so I especially need feedback from people who DID have problems with 380.65_2, as I'm unable to reproduce it so far)

RT-N66U, RT-AC66U and RT-AC5300: I partly reverted a fix from 380.65 that would cause the router to reboot itself three times if you had manually disabled one of the radios. It seems that Asus had this in place due to a hardware issue where a radio could randomly fail to initialize at boot. I've put the reboot back in place, but limited it to one single reboot. I need people with one of these three models to disable one of their two radios, reboot the router, and watch the LEDs to confirm that the router will reboot itself once during that boot.

If all goes well, I will move these files to the usual download folders.

Thank you for your feedback.

As always thank you for all your dedication and good luck with the company takeover. Quick question:

Is it safe to assume that 380.65_4 will have no negative/positive effect for AC68U? Is there a point to upgrade from 380.65_2?

 

[RMerlin]

Is it safe to assume that 380.65_4 will have no negative/positive effect for AC68U? Is there a point to upgrade from 380.65_2?

I don't think that either code changes will have any impact on the RT-AC68U.

 

[RMerlin]

-Adaptive QoS Traffic Statistics reverted back to not classifying stuff correctly. Everything was default. This has been fixed in .66 A2.

I don't have the necessary closed source components for the RT-AC3100's 3831 GPL on which 380.65 is based, I have to reuse the RT-AC88U ones. It might cause such issues, there's nothing I can do about it.

-Traffic Monitor - Traffic still does not show any reception/traffic on wireless bands 2.4g/5g. WAN/LAN show perfectly fine. (Still doesn't work correctly on .66 A2)

I see no reason for the RT-AC3100 to behave differently from other models there, and it's working fine here on the RT-AC88U. Make sure NAT acceleration is disabled for accurate reports, else go with a factory default reset.

 

[Reinvented]

I don't have the necessary closed source components for the RT-AC3100's 3831 GPL on which 380.65 is based, I have to reuse the RT-AC88U ones. It might cause such issues, there's nothing I can do about it.



I see no reason for the RT-AC3100 to behave differently from other models there, and it's working fine here on the RT-AC88U. Make sure NAT acceleration is disabled for accurate reports, else go with a factory default reset.

I've had to do a factory default with every flash just to rule it out. NAT Acceleration is disabled.

Going to try flashing to 380.64_2 and see what happens.

 

[amd7674]

380.65_2 is a security update, so it's generally a good idea to update, even if you don't expose the webui to the WAN, as it could still potentially be exploited LAN-side.

Thank you Finally I got around to it. So far no issues on AC1900P using 380.65_2. I did straight upgrade from 380.65.

 

[Gregory Phillips]

This morning after 45 hours uptime my RT-AC88U lost its IPv6 connection to Comcast. I went ahead and flashed it to 380.66 alpha to see if there are any behavior changes with it and I will report back if the same issue reoccurs.

Edit: This version will not place the second ISP port into standby mode as it cannot renew the lease from the ATT modem/router but 380.65_2 could. I might fall back to 380.65_4 and see what happens. It also just dropped IPv6 after only 18 minutes.

Second edit: The alpha didn't work well for me immediately dropping the IPv6 connection. First I tried going back to the stock asus 3341 firmware which couldn't manage an IPv6 connection but did immediately configure the 2nd WAN port. Then I tried going back up to 7266 and I couldn't get it work on the 2nd wan or IPv6. I tried Merlin 380.64 0-2 which didn't work well for me so now I'm on 380.65 for the first time. It immediately established an IPv6 connection so we'll just have to see how long it can maintain it.

I'm beginning to wonder if my Arris SB6121 modem has anything to do with this issue? It's provisioned for IPv6 only but getting a long term connection is such a chore on this asus and even on my old netgear r7500 which would report multiple ddos attacks and then just drop the connection after a few days. It rather sounds to me like they need to go back to the drawing board on the implementation of IPv6 as nobody seems to have the same experience with it. It should work just like IPv4 does but it doesn't. I'm also thinking about getting a docsis 3.1 modem and from what I've been reading a netgear model would work better with Comcast.

 

[Celtan1C]

Hello everyone,

I'm close to givning up on my 87U. I can't get my NAT/HW Acceleration to work on my downloadspeed sence 378.XX. Always the same story.
So i'm hopeing to see if anyone here can help me.

-Problem
I've got 1gbps/1gbps from my isp. And my uploadspeed always works fine (900mbps+). but download speed never ever peaks above 200mbps.
hw acceleraation is enabled according to the settings giu.

-what ive tried
factory defaulted the router before and after upgrade to new merlin fw and asus own official fw.
connected pc from main isp rj45 jack connection with cat6 directly to nic, works fine ((900mbps+ up/dl).
enabled, and disabled nat acceleration in lan settings.

Any tips to why my download speed can't peak to what it should?

//Regards Cel.

 

[Makaveli]

Hello everyone,

I'm close to givning up on my 87U. I can't get my NAT/HW Acceleration to work on my downloadspeed sence 378.XX. Always the same story.
So i'm hopeing to see if anyone here can help me.

-Problem
I've got 1gbps/1gbps from my isp. And my uploadspeed always works fine (900mbps+). but download speed never ever peaks above 200mbps.
hw acceleraation is enabled according to the settings giu.

-what ive tried
factory defaulted the router before and after upgrade to new merlin fw and asus own official fw.
connected pc from main isp rj45 jack connection with cat6 directly to nic, works fine ((900mbps+ up/dl).
enabled, and disabled nat acceleration in lan settings.

Any tips to why my download speed can't peak to what it should?

//Regards Cel.

Save your settings then do a factory reset and test it right after without making any changes.

 

[Gregory Phillips]

Hello everyone,

I'm close to givning up on my 87U. I can't get my NAT/HW Acceleration to work on my downloadspeed sence 378.XX. Always the same story.
So i'm hopeing to see if anyone here can help me.

-Problem
I've got 1gbps/1gbps from my isp. And my uploadspeed always works fine (900mbps+). but download speed never ever peaks above 200mbps.
hw acceleraation is enabled according to the settings giu.

-what ive tried
factory defaulted the router before and after upgrade to new merlin fw and asus own official fw.
connected pc from main isp rj45 jack connection with cat6 directly to nic, works fine ((900mbps+ up/dl).
enabled, and disabled nat acceleration in lan settings.

Any tips to why my download speed can't peak to what it should?

//Regards Cel.

Have you double checked the provision rate in your modem to verify your authorized speeds?

 

[jeff3820]

Under the Tools tab, network section, what the line hw acceleration says?
-Disabled?If so, you are supposed to see what is disabling the nat (ip traffic monitoring for example)
-Enabled CTF ?
-Enabled CTF + FA?
If I were you, I would start with Factory reset and a vanilla config (dont import save settings), reboot.
After that by reconfiguring the router, just check what can deactivate the nat, one by one

I also save gigabit Ethernet and I have erratic performance/speeds when CTF+FA are active...I've found the issue is Flow Acceleration (FA) so I've turned on Traffic Statistics then rebooted. Now I only have Cut Thru Forwarding (CTF) and I get my true 900 down. Give it a try.

After turning traffic statistics be sure to reboot the router. Then test speeds

 

[RMerlin]

380.65_4 is now available for download, containing bug fixes.

380.65_4 (28-Mar-2017)
   - FIXED: Various LAN/WAN issues with the RT-AC3200 due to
            incorrect GMAC state checks (Asus bug) (patch
            by john9527)
   - FIXED: Some models would sometime randomly fail to start one
            of their wifi radio, possibly due to a hardware design
            issue.  Partly revert the 380.65 changes that removed
            the automatic reboot if one radio was disabled at boot
            time, but reduced the maximum number of reboots to 1.

 

[MarkRH]

380.65_4 is now available for download, containing bug fixes.

Firmware check in GUI thinks 380.65_2 is the latest (did a manual check). I do see 380.65_4 in the RT-AC68U folder. Perhaps whatever the GUI checks against hasn't been updated (Beta was not checked, btw). Just an FYI.

 

[Morac]

Are the changes in 380.65_4 only for the AC3200, N66U, AC66U and AC5300?

 

[RMerlin]

Firmware check in GUI thinks 380.65_2 is the latest (did a manual check). I do see 380.65_4 in the RT-AC68U folder. Perhaps whatever the GUI checks against hasn't been updated (Beta was not checked, btw). Just an FYI.

That's because I haven't pushed it to the update server yet. I will probably wait until tomorrow, to give more time for people to test this new release first.

 

[RMerlin]

Are the changes in 380.65_4 only for the AC3200, N66U, AC66U and AC5300?

In theory yes. I'd have to study some of the affected code more in depth to be 100% sure.

 

[Wingsfan87]

@RMerlin I updated to 380.65_4 a couple of days ago from your Test build folder. I just experienced the 5GHZ wireless to drop on both of my routers. AC5300 and AC3100.

AC5300 is in router mode main router. Turned off 1 of the 5GHZ radios only low channel 5G1. Roaming assistant on set to 70
AC3100 upstairs AP for my wireless needs. Both are running different channels and both are in Roaming assistant on. AP is set to 80 instead of 70.

First one of the 5G died and then it switched to the other one which also died. I was watching a movie on Plex over wireless on my laptop. Checked and the 2.4G on both routers was still running fine but router pages weren't able to be accessed or acting really slow.

Had to powercycle both routers.

Experienced same bug with _2.

Note I have about 55 devices on my network.

15 wired
14 on 2.4G wireless
26 on 5G wireless

 

[pulp]

All good here with 380.65_4 on an RT-AC66U. Thank you Merlin.

 

[RMerlin]

@RMerlin I updated to 380.65_4 a couple of days ago from your Test build folder. I just experienced the 5GHZ wireless to drop on both of my routers. AC5300 and AC3100.

If both routers dropped then I'd look at either your environment or your client as the source.

Nothing has been changed in months in regard with the RT-AC5300's wireless.

 

[Wingsfan87]

If both routers dropped then I'd look at either your environment or your client as the source.

Nothing has been changed in months in regard with the RT-AC5300's wireless.

The only thing changed in my environment was I disabled my second 5G radio on my AC5300. Also the client I was just using was the first I have used in a long time so it couldn't have caused the first drop.

Both AC3100 and AC5300 dropped on _2 now doing the same on _4.

I disabled the radio since AC3100 is only dual band. So to match so I can roam properly I disabled the 5G2 radio in my AC5300

Not sure why that would cause the 5G to drop after so many hours.

By the way these are both factory reset and clean configs. I manually reconfigured.

Any ideas on troubleshooting to figure it out?

 

[RMerlin]

Any ideas on troubleshooting to figure it out?

What do you mean by "dropping"? Are you checking from the client's side, or from the router itself? Check the Wireless Log page to see if anything changed, such as the router moving to a different channel due to interference - it might be moving to a DFS channel that your clients might not support. Also make sure you turn off Airtime Fairness and MU-MIMO, as these are known to be unreliable.