RT-AC88U 386.5.2 firmware - lan traffic stopped routing

[Morac]

I’ve been running Merlin 386.5.2 on my RT-AC88U without issues for a little over a month (last reboot April 1st). Today I noticed issues with LAN traffic. Specially the problems I saw was that my iPhone no longer saw my HomePods for the purpose of using them as speakers while on a call. Also My Ecobee stopped working with HomeKit (it couldn’t be reached) and after removing it I couldn’t add it again.

I found that a lot of LAN traffic simply stopped working. For example, trying to ping my Ecobee resulted in a host could not be reached response coming from the router. This despite the fact that the Ecobee could access the Internet. Doing a LAN scan for devices only returned 45 IPs (combo of IPV4 and IPV6) when it should be higher. There was nothing in the log indicating a problem, things just didn’t work properly.

I ended up rebooting the router. After that LAN traffic worked as expected. I could ping the Ecobee and add it to HomeKit, my iPhone saw my HomePods and scanning the LAN returned 65 devices.

Any thoughts about what happened? I’ve not seen this before.

 

[Viktor Jaep]

Sounds like the data bits from the lan segment stopped flowing through the collectimizer which normally strip the flow-gate arrays into virtual metadata elements, and the only thing one could do at that point, is reboot.

Sorry. I had to.

But in all seriousness... was there anything funky happening in the eventlog while this was happening? That might give a better clue?

 

[Morac]

Nothing in the eventlog that I could see. What was really weird is it wasn’t all LAN traffic. Some stuff worked and some stuff didn’t. Also WAN worked fine.

 

[Viktor Jaep]

Nothing in the eventlog that I could see. What was really weird is it wasn’t all LAN traffic. Some stuff worked and some stuff didn’t. Also WAN worked fine.

Can't say that I've ever experienced this... but software is software, and hardware is hardware... and sometimes it just all goes to sh*t. You did the right thing... a reboot usually sets it straight. It will be a different story if you can repeat the behavior regularly... then it warrants a note to Merlin to see if there's anything on his end that could be looked at.