RT68U: Dual WAN on Merlin as unreliable as stock ASUS

[machousecalls]

I'm beginning to think there's a good reason routers don't come with freely-assignable ports which can be LAN or WAN at will. Maybe that sunny day awaits the promised takeover of SDN (Software-Defined Networking).

 

[texashoser]

I'm beginning to think there's a good reason routers don't come with freely-assignable ports which can be LAN or WAN at will. Maybe that sunny day awaits the promised takeover of SDN (Software-Defined Networking).

Perhaps. The weird thing is these errors don't happen when watchdog is disabled.

 

[texashoser]

You mean with watchdog enabled, error are not logged but the WAN drops, and with watchdog disabled, errors are logged but the WAN stays up? Either that, there's a typo, I'm confused, or a combination of the above I guess.

No. Sorry - typo was confusing - fixed. When watchdog is enabled, errors are logged and the WAN(0) connection drops. When watchdog is disabled, no errors and the WAN(0) connection doesn't drop.

 

[machousecalls]

Thanks. Just for the record, my WAN drops with or without the watchdog. Arf!

 

[toor]

The problem is that the gateway of the WAN connection can change over time and is not always a routable public IP address. And it may or may not respond to ICMP queries. And, unfortunately, the Asus routers only have one global watchdog address you can use instead of allowing you to configure a watchdog address per WAN connection.

Wan IPs can change, a gateway to change is very unlikely but possible; most gateways are usually pingable by internal address, very unlikely to turn ICMP from internal address, external most definately.

but using a "very" reliable dns might be ok; but if they ever take it down for maintenance your wan connection could go crazy.

 

[texashoser]

Wan IPs can change, a gateway to change is very unlikely but possible; most gateways are usually pingable by internal address, very unlikely to turn ICMP from internal address, external most definately.

but using a "very" reliable dns might be ok; but if they ever take it down for maintenance your wan connection could go crazy.

Gateway addresses can change, too, along with internal network hosts. Plus, just pinging the upstream gateway doesn't mean you have internet access. Moreover, as already stated, the Asus watchdog config is global, not per WAN connection. I might be able to ping an ATT network host via the ATT WAN connection, but if the router fails over to the Time Warner connection, that ATT host might not respond to ICMP.

Pinging sites like www.google.com or their DNS servers (8.8.8.8) are pretty solid ways of determining internet connectivity.

Besides, the availability of the watchdog hosts isn't the problem. The WAN disconnects with watchdog enabled are giving errors like "DCHP didn't function properly" and "detected PPPoE but PPPoE setup isn't complete."

 

[texashoser]

Gary (Asus) confirmed that his working setup is load-balancing, which doesn't make use of the watchdog function.

The bug is somewhere in the watchdog logic. Still don't know if the watchdog logic is creating these errors, actually seeing these errors and improperly responding to them, or seeing other errors and misinterpreting them/logging them incorrectly. Or all the above...

 

[machousecalls]

on my olde rt-n66u, WAN(0) is unstable watchdog or no. Trolling craigslist for a version 3 RV042