Asuswrt-Merlin 376.46 alpha - early preview for RT-AC87

[RMerlin]

For RT-AC87 owners, I uploaded an alpha build on Mediafire (it's inside the Beta folder) which uses the new Quantenna driver as used by Asus in 376_2061.

it also has a newer Trend Micro engine that I transplanted from an internal beta. After a week running it I didn't encounter any issue despite the fact I only transplanted the engine without having all the surrounding code, so it should be fine to use.

It does not resolve the vlan2 dead loop issue however (the fix to this will be in the newer GPL code that I don't have yet). For a manual fix to this, create the following wan-start script:

#!/bin/sh
tc qdisc add dev vlan2 root pfifo

 

[dfran1]

Thank You merlin!!!!

I was having trouble with the others. only minor things.

 

[DaveMishSr]

Have been stable so far after 3 hours. Thanks Merlin!

 

[bobiii]

Up and running with no problems for 17+ hours. Thanks Merlin

 

[lilstone87]

Damn I missed Merlin making this thread, but I plan to run this build in just a little while. As I was just aware of it today, and again thank you Merlin for all the hard work you put in .

 

[ekrboi]

I see some have switched from the ac66-68 to the 87. Not to open the proverbial can-o-worms but, was it worth it?

I just bought the 66r from best buy 2 days ago and it was very much an improvement over my old dlink n router. I didn't go for the 87 because simply judging by the box and unboxing videos I saw on utube, the thing is much bigger than my old dlink or the 66, which fit nicely in my old dlink spot. Plus lets be honest.. the 66 is quite a bit cheaper.

All of my home networking and tv cabling goes into an RF transparant structured media box in a closet in my home. Nice, clean and hidden away. I knew that I would HAVE to rearrange the whole box in order to make it fit. Not to mention I was pretty certain the 66 would have great range for my 1600sqft home. The 2.4Gband does a fantastic job, I have damn good wifi signal even at my mailbox. The range on the 5ghz band on the otherhand could use improvement.

I only have 2 AC devices, one being my GalaxyS4 where the 2.4G band is more than enough really, when not close enough for the 5G band. However my lenovo yoga ultrabook could very much get use of better 5G AC coverage. Sitting 8 feet from the router on my couch I get 45-52MB/s coming down from my NAS which I still feel is slow considering on my main PC and gigalan Im maxing out read speed on the HDD in my NAS at 100MBpsish.. however it starts to decline fairly rapidly when I start walking with it past 10 or so feet, and comes back up as I get closer (duh ) 20ft away in my office it is cut to about half.

Don't get me wrong.. for wireless it's damn fast. For web surfing and downloading it's great. At first I was willing to deal with the speed drop since it's not like I'm transfering large files to and from my NAS all the time.. but now I'm leaning more toward "well if it COULD be better then why not" but the price of entry must be worth it.

So was there a great improvement on strength of the 5ghz band for those of you who have switched? If so, is it enough on its own to warrant the extra $100+?

 

[RMerlin]

The Frankenstein-backport of the DPI engine isn't working as expected in this build, as the watchdog crashes as it tries to check the DPI state. I'm going to retest with the 2061 DPI files for a few days to see if it works better, if it does I'll upload a second alpha build.

Those who can build their own FW, you can currently build it yourself from Master.

 

[dfran1]

I see some have switched from the ac66-68 to the 87. Not to open the proverbial can-o-worms but, was it worth it?

I just bought the 66r from best buy 2 days ago and it was very much an improvement over my old dlink n router. I didn't go for the 87 because simply judging by the box and unboxing videos I saw on utube, the thing is much bigger than my old dlink or the 66, which fit nicely in my old dlink spot. Plus lets be honest.. the 66 is quite a bit cheaper.

All of my home networking and tv cabling goes into an RF transparant structured media box in a closet in my home. Nice, clean and hidden away. I knew that I would HAVE to rearrange the whole box in order to make it fit. Not to mention I was pretty certain the 66 would have great range for my 1600sqft home. The 2.4Gband does a fantastic job, I have damn good wifi signal even at my mailbox. The range on the 5ghz band on the otherhand could use improvement.

I only have 2 AC devices, one being my GalaxyS4 where the 2.4G band is more than enough really, when not close enough for the 5G band. However my lenovo yoga ultrabook could very much get use of better 5G AC coverage. Sitting 8 feet from the router on my couch I get 45-52MB/s coming down from my NAS which I still feel is slow considering on my main PC and gigalan Im maxing out read speed on the HDD in my NAS at 100MBpsish.. however it starts to decline fairly rapidly when I start walking with it past 10 or so feet, and comes back up as I get closer (duh ) 20ft away in my office it is cut to about half.

Don't get me wrong.. for wireless it's damn fast. For web surfing and downloading it's great. At first I was willing to deal with the speed drop since it's not like I'm transfering large files to and from my NAS all the time.. but now I'm leaning more toward "well if it COULD be better then why not" but the price of entry must be worth it.

So was there a great improvement on strength of the 5ghz band for those of you who have switched? If so, is it enough on its own to warrant the extra $100+?

I personally think you will see a great improvement with a 87 BUT it is up to you if it is worth it and if you have the extra money. I have seen a HUGE improvement in the 5GHz band in distance and usability compared to my 68 that I thought was a little better than my older 66. I think I might actually keep this 87 for at least 2 years now. The rt-ac87r actually coverers my entire house and then some with 5GHz that the other 2 could not even cover the house, I actually did not use the 5GHz on the other 2 because it was weak or no signal at all in not to far areas of my house.

Best of luck and let us know what you do.

Merlin when you release the next alfa is it ok to just put it on top of the alfa 1 build or wipe after update? and THANK YOU!!!

 

[Ronv42]

Thanks for putting up the Alpha...I am going to roll back tonight to .45. The router ran and everything seemed to work fine over the weekend. I didn't play around with any of the advanced features such as QOS but I have to keep the family happy and with me being on the road a bit if something goes wrong I can't expect the family to fix.

 

[JGrana]

As a datapoint, I have been running Alpha1 for 2 days 6 hours. I applied the
tc qdisc add dev vlan2 root pfifo
patch Merlin mentioned. I have also enabled Adaptive QoS. So far, everything running fine. I have minidlna enabled and serving lots of photos and videos, and the RT-AC87 is repeating to my old RT-AC68U (now a repeater).
Syslog is pretty clean. Looks good so far.

 

[ekrboi]

I personally think you will see a great improvement with a 87 BUT it is up to you if it is worth it and if you have the extra money. I have seen a HUGE improvement in the 5GHz band in distance and usability compared to my 68 that I thought was a little better than my older 66. I think I might actually keep this 87 for at least 2 years now. The rt-ac87r actually coverers my entire house and then some with 5GHz that the other 2 could not even cover the house, I actually did not use the 5GHz on the other 2 because it was weak or no signal at all in not to far areas of my house.

Best of luck and let us know what you do.

Merlin when you release the next alfa is it ok to just put it on top of the alfa 1 build or wipe after update? and THANK YOU!!!

Thanks for the input.. I swung by BestBuy on the way home from work and grabbed an 87. So I currently have them both, and can do tests and decide which to return. I know myself, if I try them both and decide the 66 is enough for me then ill be happy with my purchase. If I just stuck with the 66 and not tried the 87 then ill always question my 66 purchase.

Off to testing!

EDIT* Initial testing looks great! With the 66r and my Yoga 2 (Intel(R) Dual Band Wireless AC 7260, Arch Linux) in my office I was seeing about 60% signal strength and transfering at about 30MBps from my NAS. In the same exact spot with the 87r I am sitting at 93% signal strength right now and transfering an 8gb file from my NAS burst at over 100MBps and settled down to about 60MBps. So twice the speed. I think I know which router ill be returning to BestBuy Now to load merlins alpha 1 on it.

EDIT2* I WILL miss entware from the 66 (though many signs point to entware coming to arm shortly). I want to setup dnscrypt with opendns... wish I could build on this thing, it would make things easier. When I figure it out ill post a tutorial if someone doesn't beat me to it

EDIT3* well it looks like a precompiled arm pkg has been provided as outlined HERE. dnscrypt appears to be working now.

debug.opendns.com.	0	IN	TXT	"dnscrypt enabled

 

[Mastiha]

Sorry for the noob question, but is there a tutorial on how to create the wan-start script?

 

[ekrboi]

Sorry for the noob question, but is there a tutorial on how to create the wan-start script?

I JUST did this myself. I prefer to install optware and then install nano because even as a long time linux nerd me and vi just don't get along but it doesn't matter which txt editor you use.

you will need to telnet or ssh into the router and then create the script in /jffs/scripts/wan-start and then add the following to it

#!/bin/sh
tc qdisc add dev vlan2 root pfifo

then save it and reboot, and you're done.

Merlins WiKi HERE has a ton of useful info in it. Just remember that the 87 will not work with entware and must use optware if you plan on doing any extra tweaking to the router.

 

[lilstone87]

The Frankenstein-backport of the DPI engine isn't working as expected in this build, as the watchdog crashes as it tries to check the DPI state. I'm going to retest with the 2061 DPI files for a few days to see if it works better, if it does I'll upload a second alpha build.

Those who can build their own FW, you can currently build it yourself from Master.

Not completely following you here Merlin. So what exactly is broken? So far everything is running good, i have QoS enabled as well.

 

[lilstone87]

I think i understand now, in this build the way you added changes regarding the QoS engine is broken. So using QoS in this build doesn't work correctly.

 

[RMerlin]

I think i understand now, in this build the way you added changes regarding the QoS engine is broken. So using QoS in this build doesn't work correctly.

The backported DPI engine causes the watchdog daemon to crash.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

 

[ekrboi]

Merlin, I have not opened my 87 up (yet), the only pics of the board I can find online are from this site and seem to be accredited to you. They are not exactly high res but I do not see an SD slot in there. I can't read all of the silk screening, but assuming i'm right (no slot), is there a place for one to be added that I just can't see?

if not I guess ill have to purchase a micro usb3 stick as space is limited for me.

 

[ekrboi]

I also have a small feature request. Adding to admin->system under the sshd stuff the abilitly to create ~/.profile to allow for custom aliases and such. Obviosly if someone got crazy with it it could eat up a bit of NVRAM so maybe even storing it in /opt or /jffs would be an ok option. Just make the .asp check that one or the other is enabled before presenting the option?

I think I could implement it myself after browsing the code you did for .ssh keys. Adding it to Advanced_System_Content.asp seems trivial, though im not exactly sure where a good place to actually create the file on start up would be. Maybe simply adding to the /release/src/router/rc/ssh.c at the same place you create the authorized_keys file and startup dropbear. Since if someone were going to use this, he/she would be using ssh AND probably using /opt and/or /jffs if that would be the prefered storage location. I can create the file manually now, for instance, with 'alias ls='ls -la --color=auto' and it does work, though obviously it does not survive a reboot.

I have not looked at what the get_parsed_crt function actually does yet but something similar to the following

f_write_string("/root/.profile, get_parsed_crt("sh_profile", buf), 0, 0700);

 

[RMerlin]

Merlin, I have not opened my 87 up (yet), the only pics of the board I can find online are from this site and seem to be accredited to you. They are not exactly high res but I do not see an SD slot in there. I can't read all of the silk screening, but assuming i'm right (no slot), is there a place for one to be added that I just can't see?

if not I guess ill have to purchase a micro usb3 stick as space is limited for me.

There is no SD card slot in the design. The RT-N66U was the only router to feature one.

 

[RMerlin]

I also have a small feature request. Adding to admin->system under the sshd stuff the abilitly to create ~/.profile to allow for custom aliases and such. Obviosly if someone got crazy with it it could eat up a bit of NVRAM so maybe even storing it in /opt or /jffs would be an ok option. Just make the .asp check that one or the other is enabled before presenting the option?

I think I could implement it myself after browsing the code you did for .ssh keys. Adding it to Advanced_System_Content.asp seems trivial, though im not exactly sure where a good place to actually create the file on start up would be. Maybe simply adding to the /release/src/router/rc/ssh.c at the same place you create the authorized_keys file and startup dropbear. Since if someone were going to use this, he/she would be using ssh AND probably using /opt and/or /jffs if that would be the prefered storage location. I can create the file manually now, for instance, with 'alias ls='ls -la --color=auto' and it does work, though obviously it does not survive a reboot.

I have not looked at what the get_parsed_crt function actually does yet but something similar to the following

f_write_string("/root/.profile, get_parsed_crt("sh_profile", buf), 0, 0700);

Aside from the fact this is completely off topic for this thread, what you are looking for is already available, as shown on the Wiki.