Asus RT-N16 freezing / unresponsive every two days after upgrading to Merlin 3.0.0.4_378.50_0

[Raj Chatterjee]

Hello All,
I was recently introduced to Merlin firmware by a friend. I upgraded the firmware to the latest Merlin firmware on my RT-N66U about a month ago and have been very happy with everything. Very stable and rock solid performance.

That prompted me to upgrade my older RT-N16 from a 2010 version of Tomato_USB to the latest version of Merlin. I upgraded via the Web GUI and it was a very smooth process. I use the RT-N16 as an access point in my Master bedroom and it provides gigabit Ethernet access to several of my streaming devices (Roku3, WDTV Live, Panasonic Smart TV and a LG Blue Ray player). Everything looked good and performance was pretty similar to what I experienced with the RT-N66U.

However, a couple days later I noticed that my Roku had no internet access and had an error message "Ethernet unplugged" or something similar. I noticed that all the leds for the Ethernet ports on the RT-N16 were off and only the Power and 2.4 GHz Wifi LEDs were on. I restarted the router and everything worked fine. Unfortunately, this phenomena repeated ever 2-3 days.

I then switched to the latest Asus firmware. Again it worked for 2-3 days and the cycle repeated. I did not find anything unusual in the router logs.

Does anyone have any idea what may be causing this ? Any troubleshooting tips or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks a lot.

 

[greg50]

Have you tried doing a factory reset? Do you have anything in the logs? Just a heads up: The RT-N16 is no longer officially supported by Merlin.

 

[mstombs]

If it's an 'older RT-N16' do be aware they have a latent hardware problem - an electrolytic capacitor goes bad - search using google for 'rt-n16 capacitor' to see how widespread this is. See many comments here confirm its not an isolated problem:-

http://www.nerdybynature.com/2013/10/26/fix-a-fried-asus-rt-n16/

 

[Raj Chatterjee]

Have you tried doing a factory reset? Do you have anything in the logs? Just a heads up: The No RT-N16 is longer officially supported by Merlin.

Thanks Greg for your prompt response. I had done a hard reset after upgrading to Merlin and will certainly do that again when it freezes the next time.
I cleared the log when I restarted it yesterday and this is what I have now (not sure how the Dec 31st timestamps shows up if I cleared it just yesterday):

The update below repeats again and again:
Mar 28 14:59:57 ntp: start NTP update
Mar 28 15:41:07 kernel: eth1: received packet with own address as source address


Full Log is in the attached text file.

 

[Raj Chatterjee]

If it's an 'older RT-N16' do be aware they have a latent hardware problem - an electrolytic capacitor goes bad - search using google for 'rt-n16 capacitor' to see how widespread this is. See many comments here confirm its not an isolated problem:-

http://www.nerdybynature.com/2013/10/26/fix-a-fried-asus-rt-n16/

Thanks mstombs. Since my router powers up just fine and works for 2-3 days I doubt I have this same capacitor issue. This is good info and may come in very handy at a later time.

 

[gc1177]

hello, i have the same problem with "eth1: received packet with own address as source address". The fun part is that it is triggered mostly -as I have observed - by a win 7 home edition installation on a Toshiba laptop and my guess is that what triggers the kernel panic is the win 7 driver behavior. By any chance, did you succeed solving the issue ?