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Stock vs Merlin compatibility

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Manorexia

Occasional Visitor
I have an RT-AC88U router. I am using it as the gateway (routing traffic between my network and the internet),as a VPN (OpenVPN), and wireless access point.

I recently switched to an external DHCP and DNS (Server 2008 R2), and everything seemed fine at first... and then noticed that a lot of our wireless devices would connect fairly normally: They'd request a DHCP address, the server would receive it, assign an address (which shows up in active leases), and send it out... but the devices return an error stating they don't have an ip address.

SO... I seem to have a fix in place. I SSH into the router, type dnsmasq --dhcp-relay (and it's settings), and we're good... until a reboot. dnsmasq.conf gets overwritten after a reboot, so... here's my question:

If I install Merlin, I understand that I can more easily set this up and have the dhcp relay work upon reboot... BUT... will I need to reconfigure all of my VPN clients, or can they keep their settings as-is, and still work?
 
I have an RT-AC88U router. I am using it as the gateway (routing traffic between my network and the internet),as a VPN (OpenVPN), and wireless access point.

I recently switched to an external DHCP and DNS (Server 2008 R2), and everything seemed fine at first... and then noticed that a lot of our wireless devices would connect fairly normally: They'd request a DHCP address, the server would receive it, assign an address (which shows up in active leases), and send it out... but the devices return an error stating they don't have an ip address.

SO... I seem to have a fix in place. I SSH into the router, type dnsmasq --dhcp-relay (and it's settings), and we're good... until a reboot. dnsmasq.conf gets overwritten after a reboot, so... here's my question:

If I install Merlin, I understand that I can more easily set this up and have the dhcp relay work upon reboot... BUT... will I need to reconfigure all of my VPN clients, or can they keep their settings as-is, and still work?
It is strongly suggested to reset to defaults when migrating from stock firmware to RMerlin.
 
So yes that would mean a manual config after the reset.
 
If I install Merlin, I understand that I can more easily set this up and have the dhcp relay work upon reboot

That's correct. You can append entries to dnsmasq.conf by creating a custom dnsmasq.conf.add file, which will be automatically applied every time dnsmasq is restarted.

https://github.com/RMerl/asuswrt-merlin/wiki/Custom-config-files

BUT... will I need to reconfigure all of my VPN clients, or can they keep their settings as-is, and still work?

Best to reconfigure them, as I use a much more up-to-date version of OpenVPN (2.4.7 vs 2.3.2 for Asus). My implementation also offers new settings to support 2.4.x features (such as NCP or the GCM ciphers), as well as a few new ones. You might be able to just edit the settings after moving to my firmware.

Note however that going back to stock WILL require a factory default reset, as Asus's code can't handle some of the settings change that Asuswrt-Merlin makes.
 
He wants to use dnsmasq as a relay.
Yes, but only as a work around for the problem he has. So I was just checking that he's not running 2 DHCP servers.

It sounds more like broadcast traffic is not going from his 2008 R2 server to his clients. Possibly a WiFi issue?
 
Yes, although the VPN still hands out a subset of addresses outside of the server's scope.

Yes, but only as a work around for the problem he has. So I was just checking that he's not running 2 DHCP servers.

It sounds more like broadcast traffic is not going from his 2008 R2 server to his clients. Possibly a WiFi issue?

There definitely aren't two DHCP servers on the network. Only wireless devices have the issue, and the dhcp-relay command has been proven to work.
 
There definitely aren't two DHCP servers on the network. Only wireless devices have the issue, and the dhcp-relay command has been proven to work.

Make sure you didn't enable AP Isolation, which prevents wireless clients from accessing the LAN.
 

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