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Does AC68U and AC68P hang for anyone else?

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ssideratos

Occasional Visitor
I have an AC68U and an AC68P.

I used the AC68U since September 2014 on Merlin's 376.47 and things worked great! The router was ultra reliable and stable. Uptime seemed unlimited. The router may only have been rebooted a few times in several months and that probably to dust or re-arrange power cords. Honestly, that is what I have come to expect from a router as my D-Link DIR-655 that the 68U replaced also never needed to be rebooted.

In late April 2015, I realized it was time to give some attention to my routers make sure their firmware was updated to help plug a few of the published security risks.

On my upgrade day, I upgraded the firmware on my home AC68U after full reset to Merlin's 378.53 and re-programmed all of my Reserved DHCP addresses from scratch. For a second location (small office), since I was so happy with the AC68U, I purchased an AC68P from Best Buy and immediately reset and flashed the same 378.53. In a 3rd location, a seldom used vacation home, I upgraded my RT-N66U to the same level.

Both my AC68U and AC68P hang periodically. My computers show limited internet connectivity. I can still access everything else on my internal networks that go through an independent switch. The router itself gives no indication that anything is wrong. The LED's seem to blink away normally. I cannot access the GUI, or Putty into the router though - router hangs.

If I power off the router then turn it back on, even for just a few seconds, the connection comes right back and all seems well again. I DO NOT need to power off the cable modem, switch, or anything else, just the router.

The 68P gets much more use than the 68U and so the problem is noticed much more frequently (can be daily, or even a couple times per day). I though maybe it was a hardware problem, so I exchanged the 68P at Best Buy for another within the 30 days. No change -- same issue.

Even though neither is overclocked, I added a small USB fan next to the 68P hoping it might some help with stability -- No change.

I have performed several full resets on both routers and manually re-entered all my settings several times. It is a time consuming process as I have at least 20 wired devices at each location. Wireless is used only by a couple of cell phones and one laptop. The problem remains despite the full resets.

When 378.54_2 became available, I upgraded all 3 routers both 68U, 68P and N66U to 378.54_2. In this case, the upgrade was done in-place over the existing configuration because it is so time consuming and the release notes did not seem to require a reset for this release, especially since it was only a single minor revision away from my previous release. Again, the problem remains.

I continue to experiencing these overly frequent hangs on both the AC68U and the AC68P. Once a week would be too much, but it can happen daily. I have not noticed the problem on the N66U, but it has probably only been used about 15 days since April.

Again, almost everything is wired.

On the AC68U and AC68P
1) DNS Filtering is set to OpenDNS Home
2) AiProtection (Malicious Sites Blocking, Vulnerability Protection, and Infected Device Prevention and Blocking) are all turned on.

Is anyone else experiencing similar behavior? Does anyone else think it may be related to the AiProtection settings?

I may turn them off to test, but I HATE to do that. I have very few computer security incidents over the years (only a couple of incidents of mal-ware causing pop-ups), but recently, a week after I upgraded these routers, a remote office I am responsible for that I have not yet upgraded, had a very nasty and aggressive security breach where one of the computers was fully compromised over the internet and turned into a spam generator. I just feel safer knowing that the router is keeping an eye on things by blocking known malicious sites, and suspicious activity, etc. I know it works, because I have seen the router warning twice myself on sites that were indeed probably suspicious.

Anyway, before I turn off the security features, is anyone else experience the same symptoms and/or have any thoughts? Either way, even if the security features are indeed to blame, I'll be looking to for a router with edge protection, probably pfSense.

Any assistance or thoughts appreciated.
 
When issues such as yours persist, a full reset to factory defaults (and possibly even flashing the latest version of the firmware too, in between) is still recommended.

Otherwise, you won't know if you're chasing your tail of if it's chasing you.
 
Do the routers respond to ping after they hang? If they do, can you ssh into them?
 
I'm no authority here and have the AC56R which I bought new about 6 mos ago. After initial setup it worked beautifully getting wired speeds far higher than my other router, and 5 gHz band hitting nearly 80% of WAN with stock firmware. Since the router worked perfectly with stock firmware and continues to, maybe you might return to stock?
 
Thank you for the replies.

I have indeed performed several full resets and full reflashes with latest firmware with Merlin's 378.53, but neither the hardware swaps, or full resets solved the issue while still on 378.53.

I did upgrade to 378.54 in-place without a reset when it became available in hopes that it somehow fixed the issue, but no change.

No, the router does not respond to pings, and I can't Putty into the router either.

I know that my next steps, in turn until resolved are
1) Full reset and reconfiguration again under 378.54
2) Full reset and leave just about every setting at default (mainly do not turn on AiProtection features which I want)
3) Flash with stock firmware

Overall though, since no one else jumped up to say that they have a similar issue, I assume that the answer to my original question is, "No, not really. My AC68U/P does not hang all the frequently, if at all."

If that is indeed the case, that is actually promising as it must be something specific to my settings and taking it back to stock and then re-enabling one feature at a time until the problems returns over the course of several weeks should help identify the culprit.

I do have suspicion though that it is somehow related to the AiProtection settings since I turned those on immediately after upgrading to 378.53 from 376.47 under which it was rock solid stable.

Other bits of info that I did not mention earlier, in case they provide a relevant clue, is that I have 300/20 connections at both locations experiencing the issue and I often tend to notice the problem when I try to open multiple webpages simultaneously. Could it be that the AiProtection, or DNS lookup is being overloaded, or some buffer overflowing?

Unfortunately, all of this additional methodical investigation will have to wait into at least late next week at best (maybe after 378.55 is out) as I am in the middle of several projects, including building and configuring a pfSense box with the parts I just received yesterday. Basically, I convinced myself that an office, even if only a very small 3 person office including temps, and the data that needs to be protected, justifies the additional layers of protection that a UTM / IDS series of packages under pfSense can provide above the AiProtection of an ASUS router.
 
Sorry can't help on the issue, but there is a command line tool someone made that will export all your configure settings and then set that back again after a reset. Works across firmware versions that require a reset. Do a search for NVRAM SAVE and you will find it. I have lots of DHCP entries also and I have only ever put them in once.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
Excellent recommendation on the NVRAM save utility - I'll definitely look into that. I have spent too many weeks of my life entering and re-entering dozens of MAC Address / IP Reservations into router configuration pages.

Thanks for the recommendation.
 
Code:
nvram get dhcp_staticlist

Code:
nvram set dhcp_staticlist="xxxyyyzzz"
nvram commit
 
My AC68P is also dropping connections, it is stock with Asus's firmware. Recently I've noticed that sometimes when my phone or tablet connects to the wifi, all seems fine until I go to a website or check email, then the browser or mail client will just show a blank page like it is trying to load the page but it never will. If I turn off the connection then turn it back on (on the phone/tablet) every thing then will work fine. This has also happened on my desktop which is wired directly to the router, disabling the wired connection then reenabling it (in the pc's network settings) will make it start working again. I've tried resetting the router but it hasn't fixed the problem, and i've clicked the update firmware button but it says it already has the latest firmware. Anyone have any ideas?
 
I just bought the RT-AC68P from Best Buy yesterday. I went through the normal setup and did the firmware upgrade that the router was telling me I need. Twice today everything hung-up, on my mobile devices and would not resolve any website, or the apps that need network access would time-out etc... So WIFI was hung and I went to my computer that was hard wired and no webpages would resolve. I logged into the router, my Network Map said Internet connected and the WAN IP was blank. The first time this happened I rebooted my router and everything came back fine, about 6hrs later it happened again this time I was just making some setting changes and applying them and the WAN IP came back. I thought it was a firmware issue, so I went to the ASUSWRT (http://asuswrt.lostrealm.ca/download) site and downloaded 378.55. Lets see if it now happens again. I also did not have any AIProtection settings enabled, and only had 4 settings for Port Forwarding. I thought I had a bad router until I found this thread. Would love to know what is happening here.
 
I just bought the AC68P a few days ago, I am coming from the AC87r, 4 of them to be exact. I installed Merlin's 378.55 beta2 FW, and just recently installed the 378.55 final build I would guess.

I have had no issues with this router at all, every thing seems to be working other than the Traffic Analyzer not working at all or I just dont know how to set it up??

Maybe you got a bad router, believe me it can happen man. Take it back to bestbuy and return it, also if you can get the extended warrinty for it, a pays off in the long run.
 
Well so far so go with the new firmware, I'll be watching this closely. I also have a few weeks before I can exchange this at Best buy.
 
I just bought the RT-AC68P from Best Buy yesterday. I went through the normal setup and did the firmware upgrade that the router was telling me I need. Twice today everything hung-up, on my mobile devices and would not resolve any website, or the apps that need network access would time-out etc... So WIFI was hung and I went to my computer that was hard wired and no webpages would resolve. I logged into the router, my Network Map said Internet connected and the WAN IP was blank. The first time this happened I rebooted my router and everything came back fine, about 6hrs later it happened again this time I was just making some setting changes and applying them and the WAN IP came back. I thought it was a firmware issue, so I went to the ASUSWRT (http://asuswrt.lostrealm.ca/download) site and downloaded 378.55. Lets see if it now happens again. I also did not have any AIProtection settings enabled, and only had 4 settings for Port Forwarding. I thought I had a bad router until I found this thread. Would love to know what is happening here.

Ok, a little update, it just happened again twice to me in the last 6-7hrs, I noticed that when this happens I lose the IP address on the router with the ISP. It says Lease expired/Lease Renewing but it never renews. This happened with the original firmware as well as the last firmware that I flashed. I just replaced a Netgear router and the Netgear never had this problem. Time Warner cable isn't having any issues either. Here are some screenshots. Anyone have any ideas?

Screen Shot 2015-07-22 at 5.50.49 PM.png
Screen Shot 2015-07-22 at 5.51.28 PM.png


UPDATE#2 -
I just found new firmware on ASUS Site, I'm going to try this and see if problems still exists.(http://www.asus.com/support/Download/11/2/0/132/XtuNy1dJ2q1y7UZ7/8/)

2015/07/07
ASUS RT-AC68P Firmware version 3.0.0.4.378.6975
- Release Note -
New features
- Added client list view button on network map and help administrator easily monitor all client connection status.
- Added the question feedback in Administration -> Feedback
- Added new DDNS provider www.oray.com

Bug fixes
- Fixed login issue when router’s IP is 10.x.x.x
- Fixed parental control-> time scheduling related issue.
- Fixed adaptive QoS device priority label dragging issue.
- Fixed network tool related issues.
- Fixed USB HDD issue when using time machine.
- Improved media server response time when new file added.
- Fixed network map UI issue when selected French.
- Added stateful server in IPv6
- Fixed the saving issue in OpenVPN server -> content modification of keys & certification.
- Fixed the NAT loopback issue when connecting to LAN FTP server.
- Fixed UI issue when using SmartSync to sync with Dropbox.
- Fixed lease time and lease expires time
- Fixed Ethernet connection fail in IPv6 when WAN hwaddr is cloned.
- Fixed smart sync error when synchronized with Samba and FTP
- Fixed JS error in AiProtection
- Fixed allowed and blocked incoming icmp firewall rules.
- Fixed dnsmasq buffer overflow issue.
- Fixed redirect issue when using https only.
- Fixed USB related issues when connected to USB hub.

Security related
- Enhanced the login authentication strength and fixed CSRF related issues.
- Forced administrator to change the default password "admin" in internet setup wizard.
- Added protection mechanism for GUI login brute-force attack for login username and password.
- Administrator can assign a specified IP to login GUI in Administration > System > "Allow only specified IP.

3G/LTE dongle related fixes
- Fixed executed time issue when using auto-APN.
- Modified auto-APN nvram.
- Fixed lockpin function.
- Fixed send_sms function.
- Updated the SPN data from Android.
- Fixed web redirected fail after setting PPPoE in internet setup wizard.
 
Last edited:
Thanks to everyone participating on this issue. Appreciate all the advice and the nvram save info.

Sorry that I myself have been out of the loop for a while until again just now, but I have been busy on so many other things and I have just gotten so used to just reaching oven and hitting the power button on the router when it happens thereby restoring everything to working order in about a minute or two, it's become instinctive and easier to do that than spend ours troubleshooting further.

@shdwkeeper your description of the issue sounds the closest to what I am experiencing. Although I have never triggered it while working wirelessly, but then again, I use wireless so infrequently, it's probably just statistically likely that I have always experienced it while working wired. And yes, I suspect that the problem is the resolution of addresses. Seems to happen when I try to hit a new webpage. I get a grey page that says something like "ERR_DNS_PROBE_FINISHED", or Timed Out, I think. Only thing that I think is different, is that am I am pretty sure I was not able to log into the web gui, but I'll have to double-check that again if happens again.

@pinkfloyd1173 agree with you that a bad router can happen, but it is happening to me on 2 different routers, and one of those 2 was swapped at best buy within 30 days in hopes of trying to make this problem go away.

Also @shdwkeeper , promising that you upgraded to 378.55 final and not noticed yet.

I'll do my best to getting around to flashing 378.55 today with full reset and report back my observations in a few days. The nvram save, if I can get it to work, should save a ton of time!
 
OK, upgraded my home router to Merlin's 378.55 today with full reset. Won't have a good feel if it's significantly better for a few days.

The nvram save of the dhcp_staticlist saved a lot of time!. Thanks.

Is there something similar for port forwarding settings? Still had to enter all of those.
 
Upgrading to 378.55 did not help the issue on my end, I now flashed to the Asus updated firmware posted on their site, 378.6975.

We will wait and see.
 
UPDATE...

Upgraded to 3.0.0.4.378.6975 firmware and it locked up again. Once it locks up and the WAN IP is no longer there your basically down. I think I'm at a point where I'm going to get rid of this Router once and for all, too much maintenance.
 

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