WAN connection issue with 3rd party router

[thelarch77]

Hi, I have an ASUS AX86U router that has been successfully connected to my ONT for nearly 2 years and has worked well. This morning, after a routine weekly auto reboot of the router at 3am (these have been scheduled weekly since setup), the router fails to renew the lease on the WAN IP. It appears to get an IP then after 10 seconds or so switches back to 0.0.0.0, the router UI shows the lease has expired and it's trying to renew.

The logs show that authentication has been successful but after there are the 2 messages saying 'connection terminated' and 'modem hangup' and then the loop starts again.

To get network back I have had to put my EE Hub in (the first time it's been powered on and connected, ever!) and am using it to feed my ASUS network.

I don't like having a double hop to get to the outside world or having to power another device, so does anyone have any thoughts as to what could be causing the issue?

Thanks in advance 

[Mustrum]

@thelarch77  whilst not aware of any changes that EE may have made, I am aware of one other customer who was unable to get their Asus working on a FF circuit.

I guess eithMight need to wait to see if there are any other reports.er something had gone wrong with your Asus, or EE have done something. 

[JimM11]

@thelarch77 Who's FW are you using, asus or merlin wrt version?

[thelarch77]

@JimM11  I've been using Merlin DD-WRT for a while, I'm on 3004.388.8_2. but during troubleshooting today, as tests, I rolled back to Merlin 3004.388.6_2 and standard ASUS FW 3.0.0.4_388_24243 with no luck. What's annoying me is I've been on 3004.388.8_2 since it came out and it's been working flawlessly until this morning 😞

[Mustrum]

@thelarch77  I see you have found and responded to the other thread I mentioned, but as you will have seen lots of things including what you posted had already been suggested.

As it happens I too am running an Asus router, but on a DSL line, so am keen to help get to the bottom of any issues that are going on.

Would you be able to share your WAN log, maybe we can spot something?

[thelarch77]

Right, I have no bloody idea what's going on now!!

I tried a Netgear router I had lying around and it worked as soon as I configured the WAN credentials so I thought I'd have a go with my Asus again. When I first plugged the Asus in it kept connecting and then failing as before. I then tried a couple of things (listed below), one of which solved the issue but I have no idea which one fixed it:

1. Used the MAC clone button to fill in a MAC address (I have since deleted the mac address and rebooted the router and it still works).

2. I had an OpenVPN server configured on the router so I disabled that (again I have since reinstated the VPN server, rebooted the router and it's still working).

I'll keep monitoring and if anything changes will post an update here. If it happens again I'll be a bit more methodical in my troubleshooting steps and do one change at a time to hopefully pin down the root cause.

For reference here's screenshots of my WAN config:

 

I am still slightly concerned that the WAN status on the main router page is showing 'Lease time' as 'Renewing...' and 'Lease expires' as 'Expired'

[Mustrum]

Hey @thelarch77   I notice, like me, you are using the old username and password. I wonder if EE has had some issue with their authentication server?

The latest advice on the Help pages is to use the BT username, has been for a while now.

If you have some time, and have noted the original username and password if you wanted to give the new settings a go?

https://ee.co.uk/help/broadband/getting-started/using-and-configuring-a-third-party-router 

[thelarch77]

@Mustrum just tried and both the old school and new (BT) credentials work, although when I tried the BT credentials last week they didn't work either so I don't necessarily think it was an issue with the authentication server.

To be clear I was facing the same issue as last week this afternoon before I made the two changes listed in my post above. 

[Mustrum]

@thelarch77  ok thanks, guess we may never know.

But I have shared this thread with the other customer who was having issues, hope you don;t mind it may help them.

[thelarch77]

@Mustrum I kind of want it to fail again (ideally not for a few days) so I can properly figure out what happened, it’s annoying not knowing what the exact issue was.