WAN dropouts when streaming

[bigi]

Hello everyone! First post on here so hopefully it will be a succesfully answered one

I've got an AC68U which has performed faultlessly for some time running Merlin. recently I've found that when trying to use my Fire TV box to stream via Kodi or watch Amazon Prime that the internet completely drops out, the only fix is to reboot the router. This has got much worse recently to the point when tying to was the Grand Tour last friday the router had to be rebooted 3 times! I moved the Fire Tv next to the router thinking it might be cabling, and put 1m Cat6 cables between the router and cable modem and between the fire tv and router, but it made no difference (I'm running Virgin Media 200M which the Superhub 2AC in modem only mode). It even dropped out when doing a factory default on the Fire TV and it restarted!

So far I've:

Replaced all the cabling with cat5e/cat6
Replaced/removed the extra switch
Performed a full wipe and reinstall of the firmware
Deleted custom NAT rules and DDNS registration JFFS Scripts
Replaced the Fire TV box

Thinking the router was on its way out, I replaced it with a Netgear R7000. This seemed to be quite happy...until i installed the XWRT Merlin firmware....tonight it bombed out 5 times in 90 minutes as well!

I've checked it isn't my superhub - its not issuing a different IP address upon a router reboot so no reason to think it's a DHCP issue talking to the modem. The only thing which seems to have helped is DISABLING Hardware acceleration! However as I'm running 200MB I'm not seeing full throughput now (previously ~220MB, now only about 120MB). As a test I tried just using the Superhub in full router mode and this performed faultlessly as well.

When I've dug around a bit, the only thing being reported on the syslog when it drops (apart from a lot of vlan2 DROP messages). however, when i log into SSH and do "route" it hangs before showing the default route (visible with route -n). I can ping the ip address of the WAN interface, but cannot ping either the IP address of the default gateway, or the default 192.168.100.100 ip of the virgin modem. both are accessible after a reboot and the routing table displays successfully.

Has anyone had this problem? I'm contemplating building a home mini pc router and using the Asus router as an AP instead at the moment...but rather cure this issue!

Any helps will be massively appreciated....

 

[ColinTaylor]

If you're only getting 120Mbps with hardware acceleration disabled there's something misconfigured. My AC68U also has H/W acceleration disabled and I can easily max out my line at 165Mbps.

Have you tried removing any USB devices, factory resetting the firmware and then doing only the bare minimum configuration before testing again?

P.S. I believe the IP address on the Superhub is 192.168.100.1, not 192.168.100.100.

 

[Kim Puleston]

Disable Traffic Analysis. Its been well document that it causes problem with the WAN interface.

 

[bigi]

thanks for the replies

I haven't got any USB devices connected to the router(s) at all - simply being used as the internet gateway; other services (SMB etc) are unused.

I have tried only the bare minimum config on both routers - only setting the login password, wireless encryption settings/passwords, DNS servers and adding the NAT and DDNS scripts. This time i've even left it running the default DHCP range. And yes absolutely correct - a typo on my parts it 192.168.100.1!

With regards to traffic analysis, QoS is disabled and i can't find any other Traffic monitoring enabled?

 

[ColinTaylor]

If you haven't already done so, disable ALL scripts including your NAT and DDNS scripts just in case that is the source of the problem. Then test again. Other than that, I'm out of ideas.

 

[Zirescu]

Never mentioned which version of the firmware you're running.

 

[bigi]

currently running 380_63_2 of xwrt on the R7000. the only way I can get it to run for more than 20 minutes without losing WAN is by turning off HW Acceleration. since I've done that, i've been streaming for 90 minutes with no problem.

I've done further tests using the latest OEM firmware for the Asus router today and it was crashing every 5 minutes with completely default configuration and a full hardware default.

I've spoken to Virgin and they confirm there are no issues with their router but i've performed a factory default on that as well.

When it drops the WAN, if i reboot the VM router, the Asus/R7000 router or disconnect and reconnect the patch cable between the Asus router and the VM router the connection comes back up (I'm assuming the latter works because it appears to restart the relevant services when the WAN port is reconnected)

 

[Zirescu]

Only thing that I could find that was even remotely similar was an issue discussed on the Apple Support forums: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7422724?start=0&tstart=0 In the end the guy person had a faulty power line adapter. Do you happen to have all of your devices connected to the battery side of a UPS?

 

[Reinvented]

Not really a fan of using XWRT on the R7000. Don't get me wrong, I like Merlin firmware a lot, but I believe it's much more stable on ASUS routers only. Although, since I run an AC66U myself, I've had problems with Merlin firmware not working properly from QoS, to insane latency in my games such as Diablo 3, whereas I don't get any using DD-WRT firmware.

As for the R7000, have you thought about using Kong firmware from DD-WRT? I'd suggest giving that a shot first, before chalking it up as a hardware problem.