ZenWifi XT8 AX Access Problem

[Bandito]

Recently, I’ve had to reboot the XT8 router a couple of times.

The first time, about a week ago, the system stopped broadcasting all of a sudden. I rebooted just the router and everything came back up and has been stable until today. I checked the logs for this first event and there were a ton of kernel entries just prior to the crash, so it appears that something went wrong with its OS and it crashed, though the LED remained solid white indicating that everything was okay. I was kind of expecting this to happen again within a day or two, but it hasn’t repeated this event.

Today’s crash was different. Everything disconnected from the WiFi network, but the network was still broadcasting. If I tried to rejoin the network, the client would take longer than normal to connect and then report that the WiFi password was incorrect. Entering the correct WiFi password on some devices would eventually return an ‘Unable to Connect’ message and some would simply state that the password was incorrect and re-prompt to enter it in again.

Once again, I rebooted the router only and things then returned to normal after it completed its startup. I again checked the logs, but there were only a few standard entries, the last one at about 9:30 am with nothing further until I rebooted the router at about 1:10 pm. So, I have no idea what caused this latest outage.

Any thoughts on what may have happened? I’m all ears (or in this case, eyes, for reading ).

 

[OzarkEdge]

Recently, I’ve had to reboot the XT8 router a couple of times.

The first time, about a week ago, the system stopped broadcasting all of a sudden. I rebooted just the router and everything came back up and has been stable until today. I checked the logs for this first event and there were a ton of kernel entries just prior to the crash, so it appears that something went wrong with its OS and it crashed, though the LED remained solid white indicating that everything was okay. I was kind of expecting this to happen again within a day or two, but it hasn’t repeated this event.

Today’s crash was different. Everything disconnected from the WiFi network, but the network was still broadcasting. If I tried to rejoin the network, the client would take longer than normal to connect and then report that the WiFi password was incorrect. Entering the correct WiFi password on some devices would eventually return an ‘Unable to Connect’ message and some would simply state that the password was incorrect and re-prompt to enter it in again.

Once again, I rebooted the router only and things then returned to normal after it completed its startup. I again checked the logs, but there were only a few standard entries, the last one at about 9:30 am with nothing further until I rebooted the router at about 1:10 pm. So, I have no idea what caused this latest outage.

Any thoughts on what may have happened? I’m all ears (or in this case, eyes, for reading ).

Someone might interpret the log entries. They might be meaningful, or might be meaningless, depending on the fault.

Me, for weirdness, I would flash the latest firmware, reset all to factory defaults, and configure from scratch (no restoring a saved configuration).

Then if the problem persists, I'd suspect the hardware.

OE

 

[SwedBear]

I've had that a few times now with my XT8. Both I and my wife work from home now in this Corona-times and the kids use their ipads so there is a lot of traffic. Over the last few weeks I've had the exact thing you are saying happen a few times every week, a few times even the same day. WIFI is up, I can see the networks but no-one can connect getting "Unable to connect". The only solution is to restart the router.

I've even had to learn my wife where the button to turn the router on/off is. I also do not see anything in those logs.
This is BTW similar issues that I've had with the LYRA before they got their firmware stable enough. So I'm not really sure this is a hardware issues as much as a firmware issue where in specific cases this happens.

I've actually now set up my router to reboot every night automatically to see if that makes the system more stable.

 

[Bandito]

@SwedBear - Thanks for letting me know that I’m not alone. If, or more likely when, it happens again, I plan to do a factory reset and then reconfigure the system from scratch to see if that happens to make a difference. I’m not much of a believer in factory resets as if the developers are doing their jobs right, they’re not moving the settings around within the firmware, but it’s a good way to be sure that everything’s set to where it’s supposed to be.

I like the fact that they have the option to perform an automatic reboot, but similar to the factory reset option, I am loathe to use it as it shouldn’t be necessary. It could, however, be an effective interim solution until the firmware is more stable.

 

[BigBlue007]

There's not much that I can add here other than I see very similar problems with my 2 XT8. I find it worth noting that from my approx. 20 WiFi clients, only those very few that already support 802.11ax mode and/or WPA3 have trouble. Namely our two iPhone 11 Pro's and two notebook computers with Intel 7260.

The iPhones keep falling back to WWAN especially when being outside the building. But at the very same place there is a Netatmo Presence outdoor cam that is connected all the time, but which has neither WPA3 nor 802.11ax, and it's 2.4GHz only. When I try to reconnect to WiFi it either simply doesn't work, or I'm being asked to re-enter the WPA passphrase, but it still doesn't work afterwards.

On the notebook computers, what happens most of the time is that when the machines are waking up from deep standby, there is no WiFi connection for a minute or so, and then the connection is established but marked with the "No Internet" notice. In this state, I cannot even access the ASUS WebIF, neither via router.asus.com nor via its IP adress. Sometimes it helps to toggle airplane mode one or two times, sometimes this doesn't help and I need to reboot the ASUSes.

I've played around with various settings and ended up with the finding that everything works perfectly fine when I disable 802.11ax and WPA3. However that cannot be the goal here because without 802.11ax and WPA3 there are way cheaper setups available...

Before I send the stuff back I wanted to give it a last try, so I performed a full reset today morning and reconfigured everything from scratch. Regarding WiFi settings I left everything on defaults. This means 802.11ax is enabled, WPA3 is disabled. In the last few ours I haven't seen any issue. Will keep monitoring for 1-2 days and then re-enable WPA2/WPA3 mode. Hopefully the reset did the trick. I know that I didn't perform a reset after I had upgraded the FW to the latest version on the day I received the stuff. Maybe I should have. But it could also be that I screwed up some other setting that I can't remember anymore. This time I will definitely note down any setting that I change, and I will only change one setting at once and the let it run for 1-2 days.

Overall, I really love this system and wouldn't really like to return it...

 

[DeNeo]

I've had a similar issue, although not quite as widespread. Every day or so, 1 device will stop connecting to the internet - it'll still show up as connected in the ASUS Router app/login page (even having an assigned IP address), but the device itself will say it has a network problem, or is not connected.

It's always the same few devices - Google Home, Nest Home Hub, Roku Streaming Stick, Chromecast. And weirdly never at the same time - so, the Google Home is currently working, but the Home Hub says it has a problem. There was one occasion when every device wouldn't connect (including phones, laptops, etc), but mostly it's just been 1.

Turning the WiFi off and on again on the router seems to fix it, without having to reboot the whole system. (I can't seem to find an actual setting for this, so I just add/remove a Guest network on the app which does the same thing - it's much quicker than a full reboot, and means everything connected via Ethernet keeps working.)

Seems like a similar issue in this thread: https://www.snbforums.com/threads/zenwifi-xt8-iphones-connected-to-wi-fi-but-no-internet.63610/

And also people in this thread have mentioned dropping to the 2nd firmware update has fixed it: https://www.snbforums.com/threads/maylyn-networking-asus-zenwifi-xt8.61050/page-3#post-566014

I'm not sure which update that is referring to. I'm on the current one (3.0.0.4.386_25224), and have noticed it's been worse the past couple of weeks.

So perhaps going back to a previous firmware version will help. For now, I've disabled 802.11ax as suggested, to see if that does anything.

 

[BigBlue007]

So far, everything works well here. Will re-enable WPA3 tomorrow and monitor. If it remains stable, I'm ok with that because there's nothing else in the WiFi settings that I would have liked to configure different from the defaults.

Probably I will then never know for sure what exactly the issues caused until yesterday. But then again, it's absolutely not unusual that resetting something and restarting from scratch fixes things...

 

[BigBlue007]

I re-enabled WPA2/WPA3 mode today morning, and still everything's fine.

I remember one thing that I changed before that might have caused the issues I saw. I had enabled WPA3 mode also for the 5-2 backhaul band. Maybe this was a bad idea. By no means I will retry this. More than lucky now that everything works.

 

[Bandito]

I ended up with another problem with the router, so I factory reset everything and reconfigured. They’ve been running for a couple of days now, but it’s still a bit early to tell whether or not everything’s okay now.

I did originally enable Traffic Monitoring and AIProtection features, which I have left off for now. But if things look good again after another few days, I’ll start enabling features one-by-one to see how they go.

 

[sanke1]

I am having similar problem with my RT-AX88U. It crashes randomly where internet is working but crucial services like port forwarding stop working randomly. Rebooting is the only solution.

 

[DeNeo]

After 2 days, it's happened again - the Nest Home Hub won't connect. So looks like I'm going to have to do a factory reset or try an older firmware.

 

[Boffinboy]

After 2 days, it's happened again - the Nest Home Hub won't connect. So looks like I'm going to have to do a factory reset or try an older firmware.

Let us know how it goes... this sounds very similar to the issues I am having and posted about in my thread (linked earlier). Typical early adopter issues, but I don't really want to get rid of the XT8s and go back to very old kit.

 

[DeNeo]

Let us know how it goes... this sounds very similar to the issues I am having and posted about in my thread (linked earlier). Typical early adopter issues, but I don't really want to get rid of the XT8s and go back to very old kit.

Will do. Though it might be a while until I'm able to take the internet out of action for everyone at home. Until then, I'll just have to keep restarting the WiFi every other day.

 

[Boffinboy]

Will do. Though it might be a while until I'm able to take the internet out of action for everyone at home. Until then, I'll just have to keep restarting the WiFi every other day.

I have used the option that reboots in a schedule, hopefully that reduces instances

 

[NetworkN00b]

Hey, I have this setup at home (actually two sets of AX Zenwifi). I was having the same issue as you, but made a couple of internal changes that fixed it. I haven't lost connection since.

First of all, I disabled QoS completely. In the current state of the firmware, it just doesn't work.

I also made the following changes, as recommended by Asus support - For the 2.4ghz line, I forced channel 11 and 40Mhz. For the 5ghz i forced channel 36 and 80Mhz.

Those changes have made the system rock solid for the past three weeks on the current firmware.

 

[samep]

I don't use qos either. Smart Connect is enabled. AX is disabled; runs in mixed AC mode or WiFi 5 and below.

2.4G is set to channel 1 by WiFi analytics but @ 20 MHz bandwidth as many in this forum suggest (channel 1, 6 or 11 at 20 MHz. This is sufficient for my ring floodlight camera outside on a guest 2.4G network on main router.

5G-1 is channel 40 @ 80 MHz bandwidth. 5G guest network feeds my ring doorbell from main router.

The main router was placed near my cameras to use the guest network only.

5G-2 is hidden, DFS channels enabled and set @ 160 MHz bandwidth. This gives me faster 5G speed connections outdoors in my yard, nearly fast as Ethernet connected devices. I wish I didn't have legacy 2.4G devices but Harmony hub, smart thermostat and smart switches rely on 2.4G

Backhaul is wired MoCa 2.0 over coax.

One setting I'm not sure about is the WiFi power saver mode. I've enabled that and didn't see any impact on connectivity.

And the Android mobile app doesn't know my 5G-2 settings. It's always showing a default of 5G-2 used for dedicated backhaul which hides the 5G-2 network options. I know it's there because my Pixel 4 XL is connected to it. I don't think it can be both dedicated backhaul and hidden 5G-2 at same time? To say 5G-2 is dedicated backhaul conflicts with Ethernet uplink doesn't it? Also, the mobile app doesn't show what's connected it. I find my phone listed as 5G in node but I think it should also show a 5G-2 list of connected devices. It doesn't.

I've had to reboot twice early but it seems stable now. I also upgraded the modem from Docsis 3 to 3.1

My XT8 just hasn't sat idle without me rebooting it for settings commit and Spectrum doing maintenance in recent weeks. Before that, maybe 2 weeks or less between reboots for lost WiFi devices. Spectrum has some issues they've not fixed. Hard to say the reboots were due to the new XT8; one router reboot I didn't mention here may have been induced by the cable guy unannounced in my yard opening my service box. Found him in the inactivity frames of my camera but couldn't tell what he was doing. Trying to leave it alone now. I'd like it to be where my Netgear Orbi was before weak 2.4G signal disappointed upset the stability- Automatic factory updates and stable enough to take it for granted.

Sent from my Pixel 4 XL using Tapatalk

 

[NetworkN00b]

I don't use qos either. Smart Connect is enabled. AX is disabled; runs in mixed AC mode or WiFi 5 and below.

2.4G is set to channel 1 by WiFi analytics but @ 20 MHz bandwidth as many in this forum suggest (channel 1, 6 or 11 at 20 MHz. This is sufficient for my ring floodlight camera outside on a guest 2.4G network on main router.

5G-1 is channel 40 @ 80 MHz bandwidth. 5G guest network feeds my ring doorbell from main router.

The main router was placed near my cameras to use the guest network only.

5G-2 is hidden, DFS channels enabled and set @ 160 MHz bandwidth. This gives me faster 5G speed connections outdoors in my yard, nearly fast as Ethernet connected devices. I wish I didn't have legacy 2.4G devices but Harmony hub, smart thermostat and smart switches rely on 2.4G

Backhaul is wired MoCa 2.0 over coax.

One setting I'm not sure about is the WiFi power saver mode. I've enabled that and didn't see any impact on connectivity.

And the Android mobile app doesn't know my 5G-2 settings. It's always showing a default of 5G-2 used for dedicated backhaul which hides the 5G-2 network options. I know it's there because my Pixel 4 XL is connected to it. I don't think it can be both dedicated backhaul and hidden 5G-2 at same time? To say 5G-2 is dedicated backhaul conflicts with Ethernet uplink doesn't it? Also, the mobile app doesn't show what's connected it. I find my phone listed as 5G in node but I think it should also show a 5G-2 list of connected devices. It doesn't.

I've had to reboot twice early but it seems stable now. I also upgraded the modem from Docsis 3 to 3.1

My XT8 just hasn't sat idle without me rebooting it for settings commit and Spectrum doing maintenance in recent weeks. Before that, maybe 2 weeks or less between reboots for lost WiFi devices. Spectrum has some issues they've not fixed. Hard to say the reboots were due to the new XT8; one router reboot I didn't mention here may have been induced by the cable guy unannounced in my yard opening my service box. Found him in the inactivity frames of my camera but couldn't tell what he was doing. Trying to leave it alone now. I'd like it to be where my Netgear Orbi was before weak 2.4G signal disappointed upset the stability- Automatic factory updates and stable enough to take it for granted.

Sent from my Pixel 4 XL using Tapatalk

Funny, I came from a Netgear Orbi setup that had been completely solid for years until the last two or three firmware upgrades. That set me on the path for a new setup.

 

[samep]

Funny, I came from a Netgear Orbi setup that had been completely solid for years until the last two or three firmware upgrades. That set me on the path for a new setup.

My Harmony hub in the living room kept disconnecting from my Orbi. I had a spare hub to try but same result. I had already moved my router and satellite from the Orbi RBK50 closer to the ring cameras to keep those connected.

No happy placing had me looking for a better setup. Happier with the wifi reach of the XT8 so far. The router and node are placed nearer to both my Harmony hubs while still keeping the cameras outside content. I could never get the Orbi RBK50 placed as these. Factory reset didn't help the Orbi so here I am.

Sent from my Pixel 4 XL using Tapatalk

 

[Bandito]

@NetworkN00b,

Thanks for sharing your experience! Are you using any of the AiProtection features of the router, such as Malicious Sites Blocking, Two-Way IPS, or Infected Device Prevention and Blocking? Just curious as to what your experience is with those features and whether or not they are stable at this point.

 

[NetworkN00b]

@NetworkN00b,

Thanks for sharing your experience! Are you using any of the AiProtection features of the router, such as Malicious Sites Blocking, Two-Way IPS, or Infected Device Prevention and Blocking? Just curious as to what your experience is with those features and whether or not they are stable at this point.

I am and really appreciate having them, as my porn site surfing can really lead to some bad malware. All jokes aside, I have three kids who somehow can click on terrible links, so protection is a must. It's done a great job up to now.