Posted: Mon Jul 04, 2022 20:20 Post subject: Asus RT-AC5300 keeps disconnecting/reconnecting wifi
This is bizarre. I have an Asus RT-AC5300 with DD-WRT 49418 on it, non-experimental driver. I keep seeing intermittent issues with my phone (iPhone 13 Pro, iOS 15.5) disconnecting from wifi for a few seconds, then reconnecting, then disconnecting, and so on. It seems to be triggered when I'm doing video chat via Whatsapp, but that might just be when I really notice it. I'm not using any kind of advanced wireless settings, just vanilla WPA2PSK. I've tried:
-Updating DD-WRT
-RFD the router
-Resetting network settings on my phone
-Power cycle the router (seems to help for a time)
I'm not sure what's going on here, but coupled with my recent DHCP ISP issues, I'm wondering if my router is just crapping out in general. Asus really seems to have gone downhill over the last decade. It could also be phone hardware/software, but there's another iPhone SE2 running the same version of iOS on my network that doesn't seem to have issues. I am seeing this in the syslog, and it does seem to correspond to the disconnections:
You didn't say which band this is, 2.4 or 5Ghz, recently there were 5Ghz fixes on the dhd driver, you also didn't say if this is using a VAP or regular WAP.
Joined: 17 Nov 2007 Posts: 51 Location: Grand Rapids, MI
Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2022 15:43 Post subject: Re: Asus RT-AC5300 keeps disconnecting/reconnecting wifi
After using ASUS-Merlin enhanced firmware for several years I decided to try dd-wrt on my RT-AC5300 again. I tried both the regular 49599 and Experimental Driver r49599 builds for my RT-AC5300.
Both had stable 2.4GHZ
Both had unstable 5GHZ on both 5GHZ radios
I tried Auto and multiple channel/extension channel combinations with limited success. The results were one of the following: I connected but the connection was not stable/persistent, I saw the SSID but failed to connect, or I could not see the SSID at all.
I am not complaining nor knocking the hard work of the people providing this awsome dd-wrt code or support.
I bought this router new back in 2015 for $400 hoping I would be able to eventually continue down the dd-wrt path. Looking at all the listed working supported routers, this is just an unfortunate reality with this model. It is a good router when using stock code but stock lacks the enhanced features of dd-wrt. I wrote this post to help save some other owners of a RT-AC5300 some time and sanity trying to get this model working with dd-wrt. If for some reason I just chose a bad build for this RT-AC5300 (Sometime things break in newer code), please post a successful build I can try.
For now I am sadly back to running 'Merlin RT-AC5300 386.7_2'.
Joined: 18 Mar 2014 Posts: 12915 Location: Netherlands
Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2022 15:55 Post subject:
Well you have seen my comment that said it all
Like R7000P R8000 and your router has the 5 GHz interface connected via the Dongle Host Driver basically misusing USB to connect the wifi and to make matters worse you have a triband router, a difficult combination to support on Kernel 4.4 and as it is not a very popular router it is not top priority _________________ Routers:Netgear R7000, R6400v1, R6400v2, EA6900 (XvortexCFE), E2000, E1200v1, WRT54GS v1.
Install guide R6400v2, R6700v3,XR300:https://forum.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=316399 Install guide R7800/XR500:https://forum.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=320614 Forum Guide Lines (important read):https://forum.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=324087
Joined: 17 Nov 2007 Posts: 51 Location: Grand Rapids, MI
Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2022 16:18 Post subject:
I like the tri-band because I can separate my streaming devices from laptop/phones in the 5GHZ range. I did not realize Asus and others were using USB for the 5GHZ radios, that seems cheap, lazy, and explains a lot.
My RT-AC5300 is 7 years old so it's time to replace....
Is there a tri-band router available that is not a POS or should I just buy two Dual Band routers listed as compatible with dd-wrt, install DD-WRT, and disable 2.4GHZ on one of them so I can still have 1 2.4GHZ and two 5GHZ channels?
I was also throwing around the idea of buying a device like a Protectli or using a mini PC with x86-dd-wrt as a router and just have WIFI Access Points. But that is the more expensive route.
egc wrote:
Well you have seen my comment that said it all
Like R7000P R8000 and your router has the 5 GHz interface connected via the Dongle Host Driver basically misusing USB to connect the wifi and to make matters worse you have a triband router, a difficult combination to support on Kernel 4.4 and as it is not a very popular router it is not top priority
Joined: 18 Mar 2014 Posts: 12915 Location: Netherlands
Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2022 16:27 Post subject:
A mini PC with wired Access Points is the way to go.
There are several threads discussing suitable mini PC's
Triband router are often more marketing as often not both 5 GHz radio's are fully usable, so I would not go the triband route but that is just my personal opinion.
If you want a something for a main router consider second hand Netgear R7800 or new XR500 e.g. Atheros/Qualcomm based with also good OpenWRT support.
Just an FYI, I have both the hated models (AC-5300 and R8000) set up as a wireless bridge with the 5300 as the main router. The backhaul is the low 5G. Clients can connect to either as they share SSIDs on the 2.4Ghz and high 5G.
Like you, I was having problems with stability, but in my case it was only on the backhaul link, and only on the R8000. The clients connecting to 2.4/5Ghz Hi had no issues. Both routers are fairly similar in terms of reference design, so this might help you.
What eventually solved the stability problems, for me, was disabling NTP on the setup page, and installing the real NTPd from Optware and setting that up to sync to my NTP stratum 2 server on my network.
I don’t really have a good explanation as to why this fixed the problem, excepting that any time skew corrected by the setup-page NTP resets the radios at times, but not every time. Possibly it may have to do with the clock jumping backwards, or possibly some other buried trigger related to the system clock.
Backwards clock jumping seems to be more an issue with an unregulated cluster like *.ntp.org, and less so with a regulated cluster, like time.apple.com. However, I use six time.apple.com stratum 1 servers as my source for the stratum 2 server on my network, and still notice problematic drift between Apple’s NTP nodes. So any cluster that is off by several milliseconds per host, could cause the backwards jump as it queries each cluster node. Setting the DD hosts to use a single, stable, time source has helped them.
Real NTPd uses small nudges to synchronize the clock in forward-only adjustments over a long period. Contrasted, the setup-page NTPd accepts any input and jumps the clock, in one step, to the received time without regard for polarity.
I don’t even remember what caused me to try this setup in the first place, but guessing that the rekeying interval was somehow affecting the backhaul because the dropouts seemed to happen at fixed intervals, more or less.
Also, I had a similar issue with stability on an iPhone 8 that gave it fits, which was solved by giving it a static DHCP lease. Possibly bugs in Apple’s wireless stack, or some interaction with DHCPd that it didn’t like / packet corruption.
Anyway, might be worth a try before you completely give up on the Asus.
Currently debugging the same issue with 5Ghz (either main or VAP) showing repeated disconnects but quick reconnects to either the 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz (both are auto-reconnect) for an up-to-date Android phone (with no power-save options enabled).
Have also narrowed to
- proximity of a NTP clock refresh (although log shows "Local timer delta is 0"). Moved the interval to 24Hrs and proceeded to the next trigger,
- if phone is not currently engaged in internet activity, the log will show "wl1: Proxy STA [redacted] link is already gone !!??" at a regular time interval (1Hr) which ended-up being the CCMP-AES Key Refresh. Initially started to skew the intervals by 100s for wl0, wl0.1, wl1, wl1.1 thinking maybe having all radios renew at the same time was creating a protocol delay, but the problem remained. Finally moved the key refresh for wl1 (the radio used for the android phone) to 24hrs and the router has been rock solid since (24Hrs was about 1hr ago, so this is fresh).
Additional info:
- when the Android phone is on 2.4Ghz there are none of these drops.
- a laptop using the 5Ghz is rock solid regardless of the key refresh interval
- a crash/restart of the "nas" processes can happen and *seems* related to Beamforming being disabled. Enabling Beamforming stops this crashing.
Wifis have been configured according to various best practices for BCM wifis but have tweaked these values back and forth for the better part of 1 week to no discernible difference in the drop behavior.
Last edited by whitebeard on Tue Aug 09, 2022 15:23; edited 2 times in total
Joined: 18 Mar 2014 Posts: 12915 Location: Netherlands
Posted: Tue Aug 09, 2022 14:10 Post subject:
After the patches for the KRACK attack key renewal was problematic and we had to disable it to get a stable wifi connection, however for the non DHD routers that has been solved a long time ago.