Brand new AX4200 - is it a dud or am I missing something..

[Glen_]

I just picked up this router last week, to replace the cheap router supplied by the ISP I just had setup at our new place, the ISP is receptive to 3rd party routers in fact the tech recommended getting my own instead of renting theirs.

This is my first ever ASUS router, in the past I have stuck with Linksys & Buffalo routers either home flashed or preconfigured with dd-wrt .

Anyway, I connected it to my laptop first and did basic setup, assigning new SSID's for guest, 2.5 and 5Mhz bands, set up admin account etc, just basic stuff.

Swapped it out with the ISP router & logged in with my laptop, which is also a brand new TUF A18 gaming laptop. It was okay for a bit, then just randomly started dropping connection when I was connected with wifi. Sometimes it said it was connected to internet, but I could not ping google.com or cloudflare, could not open their pages etc. , then it would work again, then drop connections again, while the whole time it said it was still connected to internet.

I was logged into my work via a sonic wall VPN, but that should not make any difference, I do it all the time on my other home network which uses a telus supplied router and I never had issues when I was on linksys or buffalo routers either.

I tried updating the firmware to latest, is said there was a newer version available when I did a check from the router, but when I tried to update while online it seemed to drop the connection again.

In the end I unplugged it and put the ISP router back in place, now I don't know whether to take this one back or update the firmware manually and see if that helps. I bought this router because I thought I could put OpenWRT on it but I saw it's not compatible yet so I thought I'd just go with stock interface and see if that sufficed and re-assess putting OpenWRT on it if and when it becomes ready for this router.

I am back at our other place now & would like to try and set it up again so it's ready to just swap out with the ISP router when I go back the the new place.

Or should I just take this back, or is there something in setup I may have missed?



thanks in advance!

 

[bennor]

Have you checked the Asus router logs (through the router GUI) to see what they may indicate for your the issue you are experiencing?

Without knowing how exactly you have configured the router one cannot accurately determine if you've missed something or made an incorrect setting change.

And to clarify is it the WiFi connection that is dropping or is it the internet connection?
If the 5Ghz WiFi is dropping, check if you have DFS/160Mhz enabled in the router's WiFi settings and as a troubleshooting step, disable it.

And as always, when having weird router issues that normal troubleshooting doesn't seem to fix. Try performing a hard factory reset followed by a basic manual configuration. Do not import a saved router.cfg file. Disconnect any USB drive attached to the router as well prior to resetting the router or updating it's firmware.

 

[Tech9]

I thought I could put OpenWRT

There is no good Asus models for OpenWrt at the moment. Check GL.iNet GL-MT6000.

 

[Glen_]

Have you checked the Asus router logs (through the router GUI) to see what they may indicate for your the issue you are experiencing?

Without knowing how exactly you have configured the router one cannot accurately determine if you've missed something or made an incorrect setting change.

And to clarify is it the WiFi connection that is dropping or is it the internet connection?
If the 5Ghz WiFi is dropping, check if you have DFS/160Mhz enabled in the router's WiFi settings and as a troubleshooting step, disable it.

And as always, when having weird router issues that normal troubleshooting doesn't seem to fix. Try performing a hard factory reset followed by a basic manual configuration. Do not import a saved router.cfg file. Disconnect any USB drive attached to the router as well prior to resetting the router or updating it's firmware.

Thanks for reply - I will check the logs with it connected to laptop again via ethernet.

It was the internet connection being dropped, from laptop to wifi was okay.

I think there is a firmware update so I'll see if I can update it by downloading the file, not sure if I can let the router update if it's just connected to my laptop so I can get at the GUI with my laptop connected to my home WIFI.

In any case I'll do a hard reset and go through setup again.

 

[Glen_]

There is no good Asus models for OpenWrt at the moment. Check GL.iNet GL-MT6000.

Thanks for reply - the stock firmware looks pretty feature rich, so it may suffice, but I might check out your suggestion.

I do want to put the IoT devices on a separate vlan & do things like that.

 

[bennor]

I do want to put the IoT devices on a separate vlan & do things like that.

If you bought the ASUS TUF-AX4200 router, then that was likely the wrong choice since that router doesn't support the 3006.102.x firmware and it's Guest Network Pro/VLAN/SDN feature. On the 3004.388.x firmware that router supports it might be possible to do VLAN but it likely involves some extra steps.