[Release] Asuswrt-Merlin 384.13 is now available

[VANT]

He may like to send personal information to TrendMicro, you never know.
Eating up available memory is a safety feature, I guess. Nothing else can fit there.

Your smartphone send much more personal information to google or Apple

 

[Wallace_n_Gromit]

and another curious thing is that the computer you're writing this on with 2 connections also seem to be on a different network segment 169.254.233.135 (static) while your other dhcp clients are on 192.168.xxx segment....

I think that the 169.254.233.135 IP address has to do with a default address that OS's set up when you don't have an assigned ip address from some other device. But I have an assigned local IP address soooo I don't understand why I would have two. check the pic. Near the ICON tab you see a superscript "2"

On an additional note: I was running a second RT-AC68U behind my current one that was being used as a VPN client on a paid service. Since after the 384.13 merlin update the router seemed to be running about 25-40 C hotter than before, I took the second router offline and now have the NordVPN windows/android client(s) running on all my devices.

Soooo, I'm now wondering if routing most of my past traffic through the offline Asus VPN client router, and now through my only router has something to do with this VLAN thing.

I still don't know the identity of the device on the VLAN 2 WAN. Normally wouldn't that be the Cable Modem?

...or an additional thought. Can software create a virtual MAC address? is that what one of the programs (amtm, diversion, entware, pixel-serv-tls etc etc) would need to do to function since some of those programs would need to filter WAN traffic?

 

[JIPG]

Upgraded 86U from beta --> 384.13 ... good.
Upgraded 87U from beta --> 384.13.1 ... not so good.

The upgrade appears to have shut off my 5Ghz radio, and I can't turn it on because the configuration screen doesn't seem to render or work anymore. I've tried it in firefox, safari, chrome from my mac and I can't seem to get in there.

Symptoms are
... when I navigate to the wireless section, the navigation bar on the left goes black, can't go anywhere. I need to use the browser back
... I can't select either the control or extension channels, it's an empty drop down dialog
... the apply button doesn't work.
... it seems to give me 2 5 GHz options ... a 5GHZ and a 5 GHZ-2 which I don't recall
... I can get into the other wireless options if I'm redirected in the UI. The guest network screen says the 5GHz wireless is off ... if I click on that it takes me to the professional screen

Went back to the beta release ...384.13_beta1-g73181bd3ae ... all is well again & radios back up.

Obligatory but never old ... these firmwares are awesome & thank you for all the work! Hopefully I'm not posting something someone else has, I went through a lot of the posts here (22 pages ?!) and didn't see anything.

From my full ignorance, I have found a commit from RMerlin in the github (4 July), introducing a new wireless driver for the RT AC87U in the 384.13 alphas, that comes from the last ASUS FW for this model: Updated RT-AC87U wireless driver to 382_51640 release.

Could this new driver be the origin of the problem?

Edit: Sorry, I have seen now the answer From Rmerlin:

If you are using bridge mode then it's something that will have to be fixed by Asus. Asus recently fixed bridge mode, but they broke AP mode in doing so. I reverted their fix in 384.13_1 since AP mode is more common than bridge mode. You will have to wait for them to properly fix it (if they ever do so).

Are you using the bridge mode or are you using the router mode?

 

[dave14305]

I've been trying to figure out what device has this MAC address on the Port-WAN VLAN-2. I thought it might be the Cable modem, but no.

It should be the cable modem. The MAC is registered to Casa Systems. What does your cable modem MAC start with?

 

[Wallace_n_Gromit]

It should be the cable modem. The MAC is registered to Casa Systems. What does your cable modem MAC start with?

on the bottom of the Netgear Cable Modem the MAC is listed as : 14:59:C0:xx:xx:xx. I bought the modem "NEW" on Amazon. It came in a brown cardboard box with Netgear logo and xfinity Spectrum, Cox, stamped on it. My guess is it would normally have been offered by the ISP with their service? The box also shows a tag with MAC address as 1459C0xxxxxx. I am at this moment trying to access the cable modems User interface to confirm it's MAC address....

 

[dave14305]

on the bottom of the Netgear Cable Modem the MAC is listed as : 14:59:C0:xx:xx:xx. I bought the modem "NEW" on Amazon. It came in a brown cardboard box with Netgear logo and xfinity Spectrum, Cox, stamped on it. My guess is it would normally have been offered by the ISP with their service? The box also shows a tag with MAC address as 1459C0xxxxxx. I am at this moment trying to access the cable modems User interface to confirm it's MAC address....

I may be wrong anyway. My WAN port shows a MAC owned by Cadant Inc, but it doesn’t match my Netgear modem either.

Edit: I think I get it now. It’s the MAC of the ISP gateway (not my local modem), at least I interpret that from the output of the arp command.

 

[Wallace_n_Gromit]

I may be wrong anyway. My WAN port shows a MAC owned by Cadant Inc, but it doesn’t match my Netgear modem either.

Edit: I think I get it now. It’s the MAC of the ISP gateway (not my local modem), at least I interpret that from the output of the arp command.

Really having a problem accessing the GUI from my cable modem. Have done it before with some difficulty, not this time. That sounds about right. So the MAC address of the VLAN2 WAN is not a local MAC but the MAC address of the ISP gateway. I could buy that. Thanks.

I am a bit surprised that no one, up to this point, realized that the VLAN 2 WAN MAC address ISN"T a MAC address of one of the users own devices. I would have thought that someone would have noticed, and investigated this "alien" MAC.

 

[ColinTaylor]

I am a bit surprised that no one, up to this point, realized that the VLAN 2 WAN MAC address ISN"T a MAC address of one of the users own devices. I would have thought that someone would have noticed, and investigated this "alien" MAC.

Why? Your initial post was only a few hours ago. Give people a chance to read it. Besides everything you've mentioned is common knowledge that's been discussed many times before. There's no mystery.

VLAN1 is the LAN ports on the bridge interface. VLAN2 is the WAN interface. @dave14305 is correct in saying the the MAC address last seen on the WAN interface is that of the ISP gateway. And the 169. address is that of the internal interface to the 5GHz radio (which was hidden in previous firmware versions).

P.S. What has this question got to do specifically with release 384.13?

 

[Val D.]

Your smartphone send much more personal information to google or Apple

True. No need to add yet another company to the list.
Parental Control, Malware Protection and QoS can be done without TrendMicro services.

 

[Wallace_n_Gromit]

Why? Your initial post was only a few hours ago. Give people a chance to read it. Besides everything you've mentioned is common knowledge that's been discussed many times before. There's no mystery.

Thanks for the correction. For as long as this/these threads have been around, I'm certain that just about every bit of minutia about every aspect of the AsusWRT/Merlin work has been discussed. Just doing a search for a very short period of time over my subject "VLAN MAC" didn't turn up anything that directly related to my question.

@dave14305 seemed a knowledgable poster. When he responded as if this was, to him, also a novel issue, I just assumed that perhaps many would think so to.

I suppose, I posed that possible assertion of "surprise", to prompt a quick response/interest in this subject.

 

[dave14305]

@dave14305 seemed a knowledgable poster.

Looks can be deceiving.

 

[Wallace_n_Gromit]

P.S. What has this question got to do specifically with release 384.13?

...When I found this "rogue" MAC address in my GUI 384.13 and couldn't account for it locally, the idea was to post my concern/comment to see if others had it also, and could they account for it and/or explain it. One idea I had was, was it related to a virtual MAC address in 384.13 with the addition of amtm, diversion, entware, skynet, pixelserv-tls.

I really only have a basic understanding of networking. I have only been examining, tweaking my router recently since installing Merlin less than a month ago and joining this thread.

 

[muffintastic]

How do you get the overclock settings to stick from one reboot to another?

I tried the "nvram set clkfreq=1000,666" then "nvram commit" from the SSH session. When I rebooted, it went back to 800.

Make a start up script. Works for me.

 

[Wallace_n_Gromit]

Make a start up script. Works for me.

@ironclad posted a great solution (with very thorough explanations) which I am currently using. If you like it's just two pages back to view it.

 

[TheGlow]

I have a RT-AC68U and wanted to start playing around with vlans on the lan ports.
Am I missing something, but I dont see a menu to alter this. I see the Tools/Sysinfo section shows the ports and indicates they are all on Vlan1, but how can I modify that?
I have a cisco sg300-10p that I wanted to start using as well and was hoping to trunk to this in the other side of the house and start separating device types over there.

 

[ColinTaylor]

Am I missing something, but I dont see a menu to alter this.

No you're not missing anything. The firmware doesn't support VLANs, what you're seeing are just internal interfaces. To add VLAN support you'll either have to use a different firmware (like Tomato) of use 3rd party scripts.

 

[TheGlow]

No you're not missing anything. The firmware doesn't support VLANs, what you're seeing are just internal interfaces. To add VLAN support you'll either have to use a different firmware (like Tomato) of use 3rd party scripts.

Ahh ok. I remember using tomato and ddwrt over 10 years ago and must be where I saw vlan type options. I'm rather partial to merlin, so I'll take a look and see if i have other options.

 

[AndreiV]

Thanks Eric for this update. Well done!!!
Went from Beta2 and tested the AiMesh setup between RT-AC87u and a RT-AC68u as a node. Setup and configuration went well but some apps are not connecting properly via devices connected to the node via cable. I can’t reach my NAS for example. Reverted back to Media Bridge and then everything went back to normal. Not sure if it’s the main router that is the issue or the node.

Anyhow, thanks again for the wonderful work you are doing!!!

AiMesh ---- 87U ?

1st post in thread :

The main change of this release is the addition of support for AiMesh (both router and nodes) for those models that are compatible (RT-AC87U and RT-AC3200 are not supported).

 

[Magpul_]

Advise on the best way to update from RT-AC68U_380.68_4 to RT-AC68U_384.13_0?

Is it safe to go straight to 384.13_0 or should i update to a lower build first?

 

[joegreat]

Advise on the best way to update from RT-AC68U_380.68_4 to RT-AC68U_384.13_0?

Is it safe to go straight to 384.13_0 or should i update to a lower build first?

Go for it!

BUT: Do not forget to factory rest the router AFTER the jump to the new version AND reconfigure it manually!