Sorry but I thought you had somehow logged into the node and restored your settings there. When I changed my 68U from Merlin to Asus 384 firmware I was almost expecting the saved settings wouldn't copy over. For me it worked fine, including several port forwarding rules I had setup.
I would suggest using Merlin's latest firmware unless you want to use AiMesh. That's the only reason I switched from Merlin which has been very stable for me for several years with several different ASUS routers. I hope he's able to incorporate AiMesh into his releases in the future.
You control the AiMesh setup through the router, not the node. Once you setup a router as a node you shouldn't try to access the GUI on the node. Everything is done through the primary router's GUI. Btw, my setup is using (2) RT-AC68U's.
The router needs to be setup as a router, not an AP. The node is setup as an AiMesh node.
When I saw a similar problem I found that doing a NVRAM reset with the WPS button on the router fixed it. After that the router connected to the node and then I was able to load my config file. Been...
My node has not dropped offline in quite a while (over 30 hours) so I don't remember if the GUI showed 0 or not. The only thing I noted was that clients could still connect to the node and they were getting to the internet. That makes me think that the issue could be just a problem with the GUI...
I have 2 68u's as my mesh network, one as the router and one as a node, and the node shows as offline but it is still working. Also, if I sit on the 'Client Status' page the number of wireless clients keeps shifting, sometimes dropping to near zero. If the clients are actually disconnecting, you...