RT-N56U connection issues

[mstickler1]

Below is a copy of a ticket submitted to ASUS.

under normal usage router is disconnecting from the internet several times per day. I will be surfing normally and suddenly get a webpage is not available (can not resolve dns) error. I will check the router admin page and it is disconnected from the internet. renewing ip or rebooting router has no effect. In order to reestablish connection i have to restart my cable modem. I am running 1.0.1.4

Before you say the problem is obviously with your cable modem... I contacted the cable company and they say their modem is fine (no i dont trust them either) so I swapped back to my rt-n16 which worked flawlessly for 5 days. I switched back to the RT-N56U and began having issues within an hour. I upgraded the RT-N56U bios to 1.0.1.7c the most recent beta and instead of the ugly browser error page I now get a pretty asus error page (192.168.2.1/error_page.htm?flag=5) that tells me I have a wrong static or dynamic ip address set. Resetting the cable modem clears the error.

I have time warner cable, a TJ715 cable modem, and 20Mb service.
7
Yesterday I swapped back to a wrt54g and things were working fine but I did not have a gigabit ethernet and today i was copying disk images around... So I'm back on the RT-N56U and back on 1.0.1.4 and still getting errors (Why am I on a wrt54g and not the RT-N16? Because I justified buying the RT-N56U by selling the RT-N16 and the buyer finally got tired of waiting for it and picked it up.

Note my children have had the same issues browsing from their mac's so it is not dependent on the client

 

[mstickler1]

More Info on RT-N56u connection issues

Waiting on resolution. Note I am posting here not only to get ideas for solving this issue but to provide potential buyers with input. I switched to ASUS for my personal routers after experiencing failure of 4 linksys routers in the course of 1 month (ranging in age from a few days to 7+ years old, at several different locations).


Other notes:
on 1.0.1.7c my sonicwall vpn client (which i rarely use) requires that I have the IPSEC pass-through enabled (which disables hardware nat) I can think of only 1 disconnect that has occured during a VPN session. (like i said, I rarely use vpn)

on 1.0.1.4 my sonicwall vpn client works fine without IPSEC pass-through enabled.

I do not leave the sonicwall client running when not in use. I disable the connection and then exit the software from the system tray.

I had the EZQoS enabled with both internet application and video streaming selected. Turning it off has not seemed to relieve the symptoms.

I had 2 usb drives attached to the RT-N16 (one of the reasons I upgraded was for better usb performance) but have not yet attached them to the RT-56u

Overall I like that ASUS is pushing the envelope and hopefully it will spur the likes of cisco(linksys), netgear, and d-link to produce better products. What I don't like is that ASUS does not seem to be providing adequate resources to their networking efforts.

Quirks like naming port forwarding as virtual server, burying scheduling under firewall and calling it LAN to WAN filter and then not having black lists work correctly (I'm not going to setup white lists for 17 devices so I can block 2 pc's from getting to the internet after 10pm ... I should be able to setup black lists for those 2 pc's for the time in question but it doesn't seem to work right) I can see a client list from the client screen but on pages where I need to select a client (port forwarding for example, oops I'm sorry virtual server) I have to remember which one I want. The client screen also lets me see the mac addresses of my clients but it pops up on hover so there's no way to copy it, if for example I needed to paste it into the LAN to WAN filtering page.

Unlike some users I actually like the network map that is asus's initial interface. I think it would make a good user interface for some of my less capable clients if I ever thought asus's routers were stable enough to actually install at my clients locations. There are serious issues though. Their products seem Flaky. The LAN to WAN black list problem was mentioned above. My RT-N16 for example performed so so under ASUS's firmware but not as well as I expected. When I installed DD-WRT, LAN to LAN, WAN to LAN, and USB performance close to doubled, but I could not get a stable wireless configuration despite considerable experience with DD-WRT and the assistance of individuals working on the RT-n16 builds of DD-WRT and members of various forums. And now I have the dropped connections with my 56u

 

[Cosmo]

Hello,

I am having this exact same issue. Did you ever find the cause?

Thanks.

 

[RogerSC]

Have you tried this firmware:

RT-N56U_1.0.1.8d-p3

the latest from:

http://code.google.com/p/rt-n56u/

While this is not firmware from Asus, the authors start with the Asus firmware and fix bugs. For example, with this firmware, hardware NAT is not disabled when IPsec passthrough is enabled.

As far as I've experienced and heard, this is the best firmware available for the rt-n56u.

 

[Cosmo]

I did not try this firmware yet. Can we rollback to factory firmware after installing this one if necessary?

Thanks for pointing me to this!

 

[RogerSC]

Yes, you can, just use the regular router firmware upgrade mechanism. I believe that the latest Asus firmware is:

ASUS RT-N56U Firmware version 1.0.1.8d

Don't forget to do a factory reset to defaults and manually re-enter your configuration when you upgrade firmware.

 

[Cosmo]

Ok thanks! I installed it. Let's see how it goes for the next few days. I will report back.

 

[CorN]

I was also experiencing simaller issues with disconnects using stock Asus firmwares with 14 clients connected. N56U router was perfectly stable once flashed with Russian firmware RT-N56U_1.0.1.8d-p2 .

Good luck

 

[Cosmo]

I still have the same issues after installing RT-N56U_1.0.1.8d-p3 firmware by Padavan...

When looking at different thread on ASUS forums, it's clear that this is a widespread issue and that there is no miracle firmware that solves this.

I already asked for a RMA from ASUS. In the meantime i will try different firmware, like the one you suggest the p2 instead of p3 ... but i am not counting on it.

Thanks for your suggestions.

 

[blinky]

Have you tried the fix suggested here about setting the EZQoS?
I've read in a few places it fixes the case for Cable users in the UK (Virgin is the UK cable supplier).

I haven't tried it myself as I use a different ISP using VDSL2.

 

[srankin1826]

This may be a naive question . . . but:

Could it be that the ISP doesn't want this router on their network and is periodically kicking it off?

The reason I ask is that I set my N56U router up with Cox Cable via a SB6121 cable modem as follows:

1) Initially briefly connected laptop directly to cable modem to check signal integrity etc.

2) Reset power to cable modem, connected RT-N56U. Connection to internet established. Power levels on cable modem good. But connection to internet and cable modem would drop. Sometimes for a brief period (according to N56U log), sometimes requiring a reboot of both cable modem and N56U.

3) So I cloned the MAC ID of my laptop ethernet to the N56U. So far so good. 24 hours and no problems. I'll post again if I encounter issues.

Bottom line: Unless someone has tried to clone a non-router MAC ID for these connection issues and it hasn't worked. Please give it a shot and report back.

 

[Stratus41298]

My results may be Atypical but I just wanted to post that I was having issues with this as well. I didn't even get intermittent connectivity. My router simply would not issue IP addresses. My cable modem worked fine when connected directly. I have the same asus router as above.

Here's what I did:
-Updated firmware to the russian P3 build as seen above.
-Reset router.

At this point I was starting to sweat because I couldn't even get into the router settings anymore. Looking at the back of the router I noticed some of my devices were sending alot of data through so I decided to disconnect all wired devices except my main PC. After I did this I got connectivity right away! Turns out my DirecTV "On Demand" box was attempting to update it's catalog or something during my troubleshooting attempts and overloaded the damn router.

Everything is working fine now since the firmware upgrade. The bottom line I guess is make sure there isn't a massive data demand from your devices when updating and maybe that will help. Cheers!

 

[RogerSC]

I'm on Comcast, and used to enter my original router's MAC address (Linksys WRT54GS) every time I had to reset my router, since I thought that Comcast needed to see the same MAC address to allow the cable modem to be used.

Recently (the last year or so) I've noticed that the routers that I have (rt-n56u and rt-n66u) both connect to the internet (via the cable modem) without me having to do anything with the MAC address that the cable modem sees. So if the cable modem seeing the same MAC address was once a requirement, it isn't any more.

Just a data point. This may vary with your ISP, of course.

 

[XeoNoX]

upgrading the rt-n56u to the latest official asus firmware fixes the WAN dropping issue.

If you are using Padavan firmware 3.4.3.9-099 or later, i fixed it by (reseting to defualt configuration) then changing the following:

Factory Default: RESET

and then

Hardware Offload NAT/Routing IPv4: to "Offload TCP/UDP for LAN/WLAN"

NAT Type (UDP only) to "Full Cone NAT"

Maximum Connections: to 32768