BE92U Semi Random Issue / Loss of Web UI access / DNS failures / wifi drops

[Zirescu]

Hi All,

I finally got around to replacing my AC86U which was working nicely but no longer receiving updates and ended up replacing it with the BE92U. I updated the firmware to 3006.102.5 which was a PITA as the firmware upload would just hang and not proceed. Eventually, I got it uploaded using the Windows Sandbox Edge browser, Firefox and Edge would get stuck at the same upload window with no progress under the main OS. I did a factory reset afterwards and setup from scratch.

Now the issue that I'm running into every once in a while, I'll be browsing through the UI pages and suddenly get booted back out to the login page. I'll attempt to login again and get a login failure and eventually the captcha shows up. I'm using my password app to autofill the username and password so it's not me fat fingering that. I had setup SSH and could login to the device that way and that's where things get really strange. Running 'top' I see that the NTP is using 24% of the CPU. When I check the date command, I get back a date that is August 8 1946, a little while later it reports back Feb 22 1975. DNS lookups are not resolving either. I was able to pull back the syslog.log file and before I ssh'd in it shows Jan 22 as the date (not sure of the year). All during this period the wireless connection is dropping out and eventually I can get reconnected to the router via SSH.

I ended up having to reboot the router from the command line (Feb 22 11:25:07 syslogd exiting) and eventually everything comes back. The page which I was browsing into when it occurred last was the Advanced_VPNStatus.asp.

Noticing that the NTP went crazy and DNS lookups were failing I decided to use the IP address of the NTP server instead of the name as I remember running into weird issues back when I was using the RT-N66U. I'll look at putting it back to the name at a later time when the family isn't using the internet.

Not sure if this is a known issue or something new.

Log file is attached; things go haywire after Aug 14 15:33:06.

Some related screenshots below:

August 8, 1946

A little later after having to login again:

Similar issue from the day previous where the router date is messed up.

 

[Zirescu]

Tracked down and resolved one issue with ctrld and dnsmaq colliding on using the same port number. Thought that this might be what was making things go sideways but ran into the clock resetting back to January of 1918 again and not being able to login to the router web UI. This time when I ssh'd the ntpd and rstats were clobbering the CPU's.

I decided to restart the ntpd service and rstats continued with high cpu and then restarted rstats as well and then things returned back to normal and the date returned back to August 15th.
Command used to restart ntpd : service restart_ntpd
Command used to restart rstats: service restart_rstats

I was then again able to login to the web UI.

I'm a bit perplexed on what could be causing this, unless the hardware is bad. Any thoughts?

 

[Poul Bak]

I would try to reflash merlin, your description of the flash didn't sound good to me.
Then of course a reset button factory reset.

 

[dave14305]

To rule out ntp, can you switch your ntp server back to the default pool.ntp.org?
And make sure you can resolve hostnames from the router:

nslookup pool.ntp.org.
cat /etc/resolv.conf

 

[Zirescu]

To rule out ntp, can you switch your ntp server back to the default pool.ntp.org?

Will give that a shot.

 

[dave14305]

Will give that a shot.

Also made an edit to my post at the same time as your reply.

 

[Zirescu]

I would try to reflash merlin, your description of the flash didn't sound good to me.
Then of course a reset button factory reset.

Yeah, I might end up doing that this weekend.

 

[chance1987]

I've struggled with this ever since I moved from an RT-AX86U to the RT-BE92U. I could SSH in with my credentials, but same would get rejected in the GUI, then I discovered last week that the date had got reset to something in 1914, and fixing the time/date corrected that. Using a pair of XT9 and 3pack of XD5 nodes with it, and have seen the XT9's spontaneously reboot a couple of times. I'd hoped that dirty flash to 3006.102.5 would fix my issues, but it got really flaky Friday during a conference call, so I did a factory reset yesterday on everything.
I also saw that stock was just updated Friday to 3006.102.6, with some connection and system stability improvements.

 

[Zirescu]

Yeah, I'm still running into the issue. I performed a reflash which worked as expected this time around. Then reset it back to factory defaults using the reset button on the back of the router. Performed a minimal setup, did not enable TrendMicro, etc. Disabled UPNP, disabled WPS. Nearly 12 hours later the router is back to January 1918. Did noticed some weird things in the log file but it appears that some services are logging using the UTC timestamp and others are reporting the local time stamp in the log file which is annoying. This time around when trying to restart ntpd and rstats the router couldn't get the date. I suspect because I was using DNS-over-TLS server with no legacy DNS server entries and that everything was invalidated as 1918 also looks like 2054 to some systems.

I passed the log through ChatGPT 5 before the I reset everything to defaults and it figured that the AIProtection/TrendMicro was messing things up, so I disabled that this time around, but something is still causing the clock to go bonkers. Here's the conversation. At this point I'm guessing it's a bug in the firmware or one of the drivers as it seems to happen more frequently that some device disassociates from the router and then things go sideways.

I guess the next thing for me to try is to go back to ASUS firmware and see if it happens there.

It just so happens while I was writing this entry the router went sideways again, which was less than an hour from when I had previously rebooted it.

Log file here as I didn't see that the previous log didn't actually upload and this time, I got the error message about allowed file types.