RT-AC86U freezing

[persavon]

Hi all, first time posting here so please bear with me

I've had my RT-AC86U router for more than a year now and lately it started acting strangely. Basically it drops connection a few times per day, but I think I managed to reproduce another issue. Each morning when I wake up my phone has proper wifi connection and everything works fine. The moment I open my Macbook laptop, the router freezes and all devices in the house get disconnected. I can't even access the router's web UI. Looking at my Mac, I noticed that it gets an IP for like 1s, then it is disconnected. I disable the Mac's wifi and enable it back, same thing. This downtime lasts for about 15 min after which everything gets back to normal. I don't restart the router.

So I assume the router's DHCP server is at fault here. Any idea what to do? I'm running Asuswrt-Merlin 386.3_2.

 

[ColinTaylor]

Look at the router's system log for clues as to what is happening. It sounds like the router is crashing and rebooting itself.

 

[L&LD]

Welcome to the forums @persavon.

Two things I would test here.

1. Get rid of the Mac.
2. Test with RMerlin 386.4 Alpha 1 (been running stable for me for over 45 days straight).

 

[bbunge]

There is also an Asus Beta that works well. See the Asus-Official forum area.

A hard factory reset and manual configure may be in order...

Keep the Mac. I have a Mac Mini that works well on WIFI. As do my other Windows, Linux and Android devices...

 

[SoCalReviews]

I have several Macbooks that connect wirelessly to the AX86U and they work great with zero problems. You shouldn't have problems just connecting via Wifi. Have your Mac checked out by a professional for viruses, malware, driver problems, etc.. Even though they tell you it never happens I had a Mac that got corrupted with malware a couple years ago. It took two days for a professional Mac tech to fully scan and clean the system. Make sure it's fully updated with the latest driver updates and that you are using the latest updates for the MacOS version that you are using.

 

[persavon]

All the devices are on latest driver updates.
I factory reset the router multiple times.
There is nothing suspicious in the logs. There is no log entry at that time. Only a few seconds later I see some

Sep 28 19:36:00 wlceventd: wlceventd_proc_event(527): eth5: Auth 52:34:D8:63:7F:73, status: Successful (0), rssi:0
Sep 28 19:36:00 wlceventd: wlceventd_proc_event(556): eth5: Assoc 52:34:D8:63:7F:73, status: Successful (0), rssi:0

But nothing else.
Sometimes the router doesn't crash, but it's incredibly slow to load any page. Wondering if I should request a RMA, but this feels more like a router driver issue.

 

[SoCalReviews]

It could be a router firmware corruption issue but that could take an extended amount of time, effort and knowledge to debug. A hard factory reset of the the router using latest regular Asus firmware should help solve those types of problems. From reading your original post and because you used the router for a year at first I leaned more towards this being a client related problem but you believe it's not. If you are certain this problem isn't client related and you feel you exhausted every other possible source of the problem then maybe you should consider exchanging it. Unfortunately the AC86U does have a recent history of hardware failures after one or two years that have been reported in this forum. Hopefully the problem doesn't happen again with the exchanged router or you will be back to square one.