UDP multicast issues, RT-AC86U & RT-BE86U

[Zuikkis2]

Hi!

I previously had an AiMesh system with one RT-AC86U as main router and three RT-AC66U_B1's. It was a fully wired AiMesh, working fine. All were running Merlin.

Now there was a Black Friday deal on RT-BE86U so I bought two of them, so I could also update big part of the ethernet backhaul to 2.5G. I still kept the RT-AC86 and one RT-AC66U_B1 also. I flashed these back to stock firmware because I figured I don't have use for Merlin at the moment.

AiMesh worked but no UDP multicasts went through no matter what. I changed them to AP mode and UDP multicast started working, but there's a catch.

I have one (wired ethernet) device that transmits electricity usage information once every second, on UDP multicast. This is important for my home automation. I have several devices that listen to this multicast. Most are wired but there's one wifi device. Normally they all receive the multicast fine, but if I reboot the one wifi device, all wired devices stop receiving it. The wifi device receives fine. Only way to resume is to reboot the router, then all devices will receive data again.

The weirdest part is, the sending device and the receiving wifi device is on the RT-AC86U, exactly as it was before. This part of my network hasn't changed at all. Somehow the new RT-BE86U:s in my network affect this.

I flashed RT-AC86U back to Merlin but it didn't change anything.

 

[Zuikkis2]

Tried Merlin on the RT-BE86U's as well, no difference. Now I have everything back to stock.

It must be something in the BE's because everything was working when I only had AC routers.. But still I find it odd that it's the RT-AC86U that needs to be rebooted to make multicast work again.

As a quick fix, I now made a cronjob for my Raspberry that check if multicast is working; if not, it reboots the router through SSH..