RT-AC68U and RT-AC56U: Beta firmware feedback

[elpibe10]

I have been running stable on both beta versions with no lock ups. Have always had igmp snooping enabled.

Yes, IGMP Snooping should be working without issue as I recalled having enabled it when my RT-N66U was serving as a router.

I chose to disable it when I switched to the RT-AC68U as I remember reading somewhere that IGMP Snooping is not going to benefit most users especially on a home setup.

I'm really puzzled why it made such a huge difference on the RT-AC68U (for me at least).

The only possible 'culprit' I can think of is one of the client devices that are connected to the router.

At any one time, I've at least 4 devices permanently connected to the router ... 2 wireless bridge (RT-N56U and D-Link DAP-2553) on 5GHz and 2 IP cams on 2.4GHz.

 

[Stepalex]

Having random router lock ups with this beta firmware (433).

Never encountered any freeze with earlier Asus firmware

+1 - 3 freezes in 3 days, only solution is to reboot the router, never had it before.

 

[elpibe10]

I chose to disable it when I switched to the RT-AC68U as I remember reading somewhere that IGMP Snooping is not going to benefit most users especially on a home setup.

I was referring to this old post in another forum that managed to convince me to have IGMP Snooping disabled :

"No point in having IGMP on. Its only used between host and router/switch communication to register to a multicast group so that it tells upstream router that there are members in a particular group that wants the traffic.

Useless in your home network, unless you are explicitly using multicast. But then you will also need to enable PIM sparse-dense mode or whatever u want and Rendezvous Point depending on your multicast setup."

+1 - 3 freezes in 3 days, only solution is to reboot the router, never had it before.

Disabling IGMP Snooping (on both bands) seem to have solved the freezing problem for me (keeping my fingers crossed ).

 

[ikoul]

Installed the beta over the weekend, and here are my impressions from the last few days:

2.4Ghz performance is a bit better. About the best I can expect given all the networks near me (no open channels, at least one person forcing 40mhz mode when they really shouldn't be). Thankfully most of my devices are dual band.

5Ghz performance is about the same. Which makes sense because there was no claim of improvements there.

Overall stability - no crashes or performance degradation. Wasn't having them before and still don't. Some people were talking about IGMP snooping, which I've never enabled so I can't comment on it.

Summary: This build seems to fix some of the 2.4Ghz issues people were having and I see no reason why at least the wireless driver wouldn't be ready for use in future builds. I'd say this build is worthy of public release assuming it passes all of Asus' internal tests and nobody else reports a show-stopping bug (and if the IGMP thing isn't really prevalent).

 

[TimothyM96]

Multiple days, going strong. Have not needed reboot or anything like that. I have AiCloud syncing and running, FTP, Time machine, and some other goodies.

It's weird though, I feel like my range went back to "default". I have ASUS's 9dBi antenna and it used to boost the signal, but it is marginal at best. The signal isn't bad for stock antenna, but for the 9dBi it didn't improve, in fact it seemed to downgrade.

 

[apenney]

Waited a few days to comment:

Everything is working great, my signal is definitely improved (I was having trouble getting coverage in my bedroom, now it seems to be fine). I don't think I was really suffering the 2.4 slowdown before (or wasn't noticing it), but I feel like overall things are a little faster for me.

I was having an issue with my HTPC acting up on wifi and that's now resolved (or seems to be).

No real logged errors, except for a weird chunk of wifi stuff after several days:

Dec 10 12:37:31 kernel: wlc_dump_aggfifo:
Dec 10 12:37:31 kernel: framerdy 0x0 bmccmd 7 framecnt 0x400
Dec 10 12:37:31 kernel: AQM agg params 0x3ef maxlen hi/lo 0x0 0xffff minlen 0x34 adjlen 0x8
Dec 10 12:37:31 kernel: AQM agg results 0x8001 len hi/lo: 0x0 0x616 BAbitmap(0-3) 0 0 0 0

And a stray:

Dec 9 10:58:02 miniupnpd[676]: unsupported NAT-PMP version : 2

(No idea what's doing that.)

 

[Stepalex]

Disabling IGMP Snooping (on both bands) seem to have solved the freezing problem for me (keeping my fingers crossed ).

Just checked - disabled on both bands... and yet another freeze

 

[Fester1952]

Hi

Unfortunately there is still something wrong with this firmware.

Everything was working fine in the beginning but after almost 2 days the connection speed slows down dramatically and all network activity on the 2.4 Ghz runs extremely slow :-(

Same here. 5GHz no issue. I too am beginning to think that my router is maybe faulty as no firmware, either Asus, Merlin or DD-WRT has fixed my 2.4GHz issues.

 

[elpibe10]

Just checked - disabled on both bands... and yet another freeze

Was it a complete freeze like mine where power cycling is required ?

Mine's still working fine (after disabling IGMP Snooping) but it's only slightly over a day

So far I've not seen any range or throughput improvement (on this beta) over earlier firmware versions but I didn't encounter any issue with both bands previously either.

 

[Sky1111]

WARNING: ASUS firmware will NOT reconnect VPN after reboot

Oh man... accidentally noticed that the web pages started showing local again - and yes, VPN client does NOT reconnect after reboot!!!

ASUS - please fix this issue ASAP - VPN client should remember it's setting (connected or NOT connected) and go the same state after reboot.

Merlin's firmware is very reliable in this aspect - never had any security issues like that...

 

[AndreaS]

Just installed the latest beta. Nothing to say about the wireless coverage. I just tsted it with my smartphone running inssider and the signal looks good on both 2.4 and 5 GHz. I'll deepen the matter when my daughter will be back home as she runs a laptop in the most critical room of my house (two floors, opposite side of the house).
So everything looks smooth, except for the web interface. On my pc, under windows 8.1 is nearly impossible to use. I tried to update the driver of the Intel nic with no success: both explorer and firefox are very slow with this router and to load a page I always have to stop the data transfer and reload the page.
The only thing that improved a little was to clear the browser cache. Both explorer and firefox were able to load the router web pages smoothly, but this lasted for only 5 or 6 pages. After that it was again necessary to stop and reload the pages to access them. Consider that from both browsers I can access smoothly the web pages of two nas i have on the same network.
If I run linux on the same PC, no problems with both chrome and firefox.
So I guess some problems with the handling of the browser's cache in win 8.1.
I had the same behaviour with the .225 firmware. But in this case my experience lasted after five minutes because I installed this beta through cfe right after unboxing the router.

 

[RMerlin]

So everything looks smooth, except for the web interface. On my pc, under windows 8.1 is nearly impossible to use. I tried to update the driver of the Intel nic with no success: both explorer and firefox are very slow with this router and to load a page I always have to stop the data transfer and reload the page.

If you are running ESET's security software, this is a known issue with their software. ESET is supposed to be looking into it.

 

[AndreaS]

If you are running ESET's security software, this is a known issue with their software. ESET is supposed to be looking into it.

Thanks. Yes, I'm running Nod 32. I may try to exclude the Directory where the bowser's cache resides from the nod 32 inspected directories and see what happens (I hope that the browsing protection won't be affected).

 

[JeroenR]

New version now available for Download 3.0.0.4.374.454

Just noticed on the Asus Support site that the new version is available for download. (I selected Windows 8 64 bit, but the client OS shouldn't matter)

Direct Link: http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/wireless/RT-AC68R/FW_RT_AC68R_3004374454.zip

So far so good, but then I wasn't experiencing any problems with the previous release (I mainly use 5Ghz)

 

[RMerlin]

Thanks. Yes, I'm running Nod 32. I may try to exclude the Directory where the bowser's cache resides from the nod 32 inspected directories and see what happens (I hope that the browsing protection won't be affected).

Do a forum search on this issue (here on SmallNetBuilder), there are various threads discussing this issue. I don't remember what setting people have to disable to resolve this issue. The issue is with content filtering from what I recall, not with local file scanning.

 

[RMerlin]

Unsticking this, as the final release is now available.

 

[AndreaS]

Do a forum search on this issue (here on SmallNetBuilder), there are various threads discussing this issue. I don't remember what setting people have to disable to resolve this issue. The issue is with content filtering from what I recall, not with local file scanning.

Thank you again, Merlin. The setting that actually solved the problem was to exclude the router IP from the protocol filtering.

 

[Elvis7]

day 3 on the beta firm, 2.4 network speeds have slowed down to a crawl, 5-7mb/s 5 feet from the router on my cell and laptop.

updating to the official release, perhaps it will help.

 

[Asusnet]

day 3 on the beta firm, 2.4 network speeds have slowed down to a crawl, 5-7mb/s 5 feet from the router on my cell and laptop.

updating to the official release, perhaps it will help.

.433 should resolve many but not all 2.4Ghz issues, and .454 should be even better.

A new beta should be available soon.

 

[Sky1111]

.433 should resolve many but not all 2.4Ghz issues, and .454 should be even better.

A new beta should be available soon.

Hi Asusnet,
- will the new Beta available for AC56U as well?
- which fixes do you anticipate in that release?

thanks for giving us a heads-up!