Asus DDNS weirdness (AX88U - merlin 384.14)

[MrRederick]

Hi all,

Newish poster here, have been lurking for a long time. Just upgraded to my THIRD Asus router, the RT-AX88U so that I can gift my trusty RT-AC88U to my parents. I set up the AX88U from scratch, flashed Merlin's firmware, then factory reset, then configured all the settings. Everything working properly except the Asus free DDNS service.

In the last 3 or so years, I have become quite used to the Asus DDNS being flaky and intermittent, but this takes it to a higher level. The DNS randomly stops responding, and then starts again, then stops, then starts. As if my entry on the database was being cleared, added, cleared etc.

This worked flawlessly on the AC88U for over 2 years, and is still working on other friends routers.

I have switched DDNS provider, and this graphic shows the oddity. There should be a solid colour all the way across, but due to DNS not responding a black line is drawn. You can see the spikes when the Asus DDNS did respond, and at the end I have switched to a different DDNS provider, and the trace draws as expected.
https://www.redsplace.co.uk/forum/asus-to-other.png

Anyone else seen such a thing?

cheers,
MrRederick

UK - ASUS RT-AX88U (merlin 384.14) on UK Virgin Media cable.

 

[RMerlin]

If you changed router, make sure you either change to a new Asus DDNS hostname, or ensure that the old hostname is released by Asus (as it will be tied to the router's MAC address).

You can contact Asus tech support if you wish for them to release your old hostname for you, so you can reuse it with the new router.

My personal advice when it comes to DDNS: if you own a domain name, then create a CNAME pointing to the DDNS. That way, if you change DDNS provider, you only need to change your CNAME, and won't need to update anything else that relies on your DDNS hostname (VPN client and such).

And I prefer an established service like Afraid than Asus DDNS, as it seems to be more reliable, and isn't tied to your router either.

 

[JGrana]

As RMerlin said, make sure to release the domain name of the AC88u before you try to setup the AX88u. In fact, if you tried you should have received an error message.
One way I have done this in the past - if you still have the AC88u, go to the DDNS settings and rename it. Add a character to the end of your host name for example. Hit apply, and Asus should release the old name and use the new one.
Now, you can use that original name on the AX88u setup.

 

[MrRederick]

Thank you both. I had released the name on the old router before powering it down, I actually changed the name, and checked the old was no longer in use, then turned off the DDNS switch. Around 30 minutes later neither name resolved on Google DNS, or my ISPs DNS. The DDNS was registering - the A record assigned to my IP - but when querying the record externally, the resolution would randomly fail. This is shown in the monitoring graph picture, and also from my hosted server being unable to resolve the DNS occasionally. I have actually done exactly as RMerlin suggested, set up a hostname on my domain, and CNAME'd the DDNS, so swapping provider was easy. I also went for Afraid.org, seems a very established and engineering level service. Ideal.

Thank you RMerlin for the great firmware, and Happy New Year to all.

 

[RMerlin]

If the resolution failures were random then it looks like a cluster issue on Asus's backend.

 

[MrRederick]

If the resolution failures were random then it looks like a cluster issue on Asus's backend.

Thanks, I came to the same conclusion.
I have reinstalled my old RT-AC88U at my parents, an hour away, on a very different ISP, and tried two brand new names on Asus DDNS. Both of which gave the same problem with resolution, so they are now also using afraid.org.

I think Asus' DDNS service has a problem with any newly created entries.