RT-N66U admin password won't change!

[JP56]

New Asus RT-N66U router, with default admin/admin user/password.
I configured the router as required & changed the admin password to a more secure one, logged out, tried logging back in... no joy. Tried admin/admin, still no joy. Rebooted router & tried again. No joy.
Had to hard reset router to get access back
Re-configured, put in a simpler (8 chara) admin password. Tried again. Same as above - no login. Had to hard reset again.
Now getting tedious.
What am I doing wrong? Or what's the problem? Thanks!

 

[jlake]

What firmware? Try firmware .276

You can also search the forum because your question has been asked a lot in the last week or two.

 

[jlake]

http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showthread.php?t=13634

 

[JP56]

I'm on latest firmware .979...

Is the suggestion that the problem appeared in this FW version?

 

[RogerSC]

One good way to check out a problem is to try previous firmware. If you don't see it there, then it's a new problem. If you do, then your router might be ailing, or there might be another issue. So the suggestion to try older firmware is a good one to see what's going on.

The older firmware that you were pointed at is a good place to start in troubleshooting this way, since it doesn't have that problem built-in, and is generally stable for the RT-N66U. If you see this problem in .276, then there's something else going on. If you don't, then you know that the problem was introduced more recently. If this is a firmware problem, I suspect that it has appeared very recently.

 

[JP56]

I'm not aware of restrictions on password for admin login (eg max charas, no special charas etc...) is it possible I'm using an invalid password (16 alphanumerics) and so being locked out & forced to hard reset in order to re-establish router admin access?

 

[wouterv]

Try very regular characters first (Aa to Zz and 0-9), if that goes well, carefully try the odd characters like @#$~
I advise to limit the characters up to ASCII code 126:
http://www.asciitable.com/
Avoid wildcard characters * ? ! &, slashes \ /, brackets [ ], parenthesis ( ), braces { }, chevrons < >.
I don't have password problems with characters within that ASCII set in my router with firmware .979
Finally I dont believe your router password has to be ultimately strong, unless you do not thrust your home companions and unless you do not allow WAN access.
Common standard password strenght usually does the job:
Minimum 8 characters in length, containing Uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, symbols.

 

[JP56]

I stayed on .979 firmware & hard reset the router, started again with an 8 chara alphanumeric password - all good. Added characters up to 12, all still good so stopped there.
It was a 16 chara password that led to my 'unable to admin login' problem, so I assume there's somekind of undocumented restriction...