RT-BE92U - On-going random losses of Internet/WAN access

[AndrewMcN]

I've had the RT-BE92U for a few weeks now and a couple of times a day it simply stops routing DNS WAN traffic and the Wi-Fi networks also stop routing. All Internet access grinds to a halt because of this. Sometimes it returns to normal on its own but today it was so inconvenient that I got it to reboot via the web UI. It's then fine again for several hours.

It's like the unit itself enters some kind of semi-hung/crashed state. I'm thinking there's some kind of memory leak or that the RAM capacity is insufficient. It runs for several hours and then begins going faulty.

I am 26 years into an advanced IT solutions architecture/engineering career covering pretty much all kinds of infrastructure. So, the most I'm guilty of is not trying the basics.

I am able to ping externally, however I tend to find that I cannot get DNS traffic to pass and that includes direct queries of external DNS services, e.g. 8.8.8.8 (I can ping this guy).

The Wi-Fi networks can't even reach the router itself. I have to go to my wired laptop to engage with the router. The router web UI responds normally. The system log just seems to show either long pauses between log entries or errors about wireless client disconnects.

This kind of error seems to be common in the log just now:

kernel: WLC_SCB_DEAUTHENTICATE_FOR_REASON err -30
kernel: WLC_SCB_DEAUTHORIZE error (-30)

Could be red herrings but they always seem to be around when the crashes happen.

I have a lot of smart devices. It says I have a total of 54 clients but the vast majority of those will generate very little traffic.

I use Sky Stream. So, there can be a lot of throughput there. I also watch a lot of Twitch. Again a lot of data passing through for that. Nothing I wouldn't expect this router to handle though.

I have AiMesh up and running with two nodes.

I use the Time Machine backup capability with a USB drive attached. There's an hourly backup.

I have the AiProtection turned on. DoS protection enabled.

I also have the DNS over TLS enabled opportunistically but I've tried putting this off and it doesn't help.

I just fear that the hardware spec isn't able to handle the workload.

It just seems like the firmware isn't stable enough yet. I need to decide if I should be returning this or just be patient and wake for the next firmware updates.

Anyone else with this router experiencing issues despite factory resetting?

[jimmysofat6864]

I'm on latest firmware version and I'm pretty sure my router updated itself while I was setting it up because at first, I was on the old firmware version but now I'm on the latest. Either way I did perform a factory reset once before as initially WAN wasn't working but after that it started working and I didn't need to perform any updates. Either way I was on latest firmware version and I had the same issues. 

I don't think it's InstantGuard because I never used that feature but I had Ai protection, QoS, apps analysis, Traffic Analyzer, MLO, and IPV6 enabled and I was sitting at 80% memory usage. I also had DoS protection off unlike your setup. I don't get any core temperature warnings but I did get messages like "IEEE 802.11: Could not add STA to kernel driver" and "kernel: WLC_SCB_DEAUTHORIZE error (-30)"  before with my old settings so I'm turning all those features off and if it's stable then I know it's one of those. After turning off all those features I'm at 62% memory usage so I'll see how it goes. 

[jimmysofat6864]

Did you also have  QoS, apps analysis, MLO, and IPV6 enabled beforehand and have issues? I'm still trying to rule out what could be causing the issue as I never enabled the InstantGuard VPN feature or any SMB/USB file sharing features at all and I still had the random loss of internet connectivity. 

[AndrewMcN]

I noted that I don’t use InstantGuard either but you have to understand that you don’t have to be using a feature for a bug in its code to affect everything else. InstantGuard is the only feature ASUS has publicly disclosed an issue having been fixed. So, it’s an assumption that it is the component that was giving us all trouble. It’s also possible that they fixed other system components and have not disclosed the specifics.

[jimmysofat6864]

I'm suspecting that it might be more than instant guard causing the issue and the actual cause is having too many services enabled and the router not being able to keep up. I've disabled Ai protection, QoS, apps analysis, Traffic Analyzer, and MLO and so far it's going for about a day and a half which is more than I can say for the previous setup as mine would fail past the 1 day mark. Since you noted that you have AI protection enabled going strong for multiple days, I'm plan to turn that on as well as MLO and see what happens. 

[Lid]

My very similar issues seem to have started since the 37435 firmware which updated automatically on 2nd Jan (automatic update now disabled) - so you did a full factory reset, let the firmware update first?  My config took a long time, I could reset but would be restoring from a config file. Do you think that might be a useful exercise? Ripping my hair out with family moaning about the constant reboots this router is inflicting on us the last couple of days.