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ASUS GT-AC5300 Problems Galore

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Darf Nader

Occasional Visitor
I recently purchased a refurbished GT-AC5300 as my primary wireless router, and while it has impressive OTA bandwidth, it's one peculiar piece of hardware! From the get-go it was a bee's nest of problems. The first headache was when I changed username and password during the initial setup which only served to lock me out. (I later figured out you couldn't change the user name until later due to what would appears to be a bug in the manual setup workflow.)

Then I hit a big roadblock when I changed the router IP later during the initial configuration, and it apparently got into a strange state where even with a static IP, it failed to route IP traffic on the old or new subnet assignment, nor did the web admin tool respond to its old or new IP. All the LEDs showed it's function as sterling though! I tried holding the reset button with power-up six ways to Sunday with the only effect being that I could get it into the mini-web interface if I wanted to flash it, which I didn't. It was not until I read somewhere about holding the WPS button for 3 seconds after power up that I got the factory reset to actually reset. That took one or two hours of confusion and got me nice and frustrated.

Then, after getting it configured and seemingly working, it slipped into the bizarre state that it is in now. That is, I can reach the admin console as well as other internal LAN sites, I can ping external addresses by both IP and by name, but I cannot establish a complete TCP connection to anything on WAN. Any page requests to external sites, by name or by IP, just hang and time out. This happens with any device on my LAN... except when I was behind my second router. (it's an Asus RT-AC68P/U B1 running Advanced Tomato on a separate subnet. I intended to have VyprVPN Chameleon running full-time on, but it is presently just bare traffic while I troubleshoot this wierdness.) For whatever reason, all traffic from behind that second router, to any address on its LAN, its WAN but the primary router's LAN, or the actual WAN, works flawlessly! I have fiddled with the GT-AC5300's settings, ran traceoutes and pings, disconnected everything except a single wired computer to test, reset it, and attempted (and failed) to connect to remote ssh servers by IP from the primary's LAN, but I cannot figure out why nothing on the GT-AC5300's LAN while traffic that is behind the RT-AC68P works perfectly. The whole thing makes no sense to me. I am presently on the wifi LAN behind my second router to write this post, but I would not be able to were I directly connected to the GT-AC5300.

I have to admit, I've been working in systems administration and devops for 20 years and can't say I have come across behavior like this before. I would expect if there were a routing or firewall problem that was wrecking all TCP connections on the LAN, traffic behind the second router would be affected just any other traffic on the LAN. Next to testing with tcpdump I am not sure where to go from here. If you have any suggestions as to how to solve this mystery, I am ready to test your theories.
 
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