Posted: Thu Sep 15, 2016 8:00 Post subject: RT-AC88U AC3100 with Merlin Firmware, I want to go DD-WRT
Hi all,
I have a Asus RT-AC88U AC3100 Router with Asuswrt-Merlin firmware flashed, works fine, BUT the OpenVPN part does not, asked my VPN provider what firmware was supported and found out that the Asuswrt-Merlin firmware was not supported even if there is a OpenVPN area in the Asuswrt-Merlin firmware, my VPN provider told me that DD-WDR was supported so I found the DD-WRT file to flash (asus_rt-ac88u-firmware.trx) and as I understand it that firmware came out 2016-09-14 and is a Beta,
I have a question, is there only one file to flash for this router or is there two files to flash, the reason for me asking is that I have seen some Asus routers needs two files to be flashed for it to work?.
Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2016 9:30 Post subject: DD-WRT
That worked, running DD-WRT Thanx m8
Internet-led is bright red now (not white), WAN port seems to be working, router is online and on internet (WiFi Only), non of the 8 LAN-ports works?, I saw something about this here on dd-wrt.com, cant remember where just..
I recall seeing that on the forum as well in the past two months when I was researching purchase of ASUS RT-AC88U. I have dd-wrt installed on two d-link 880L routers. I subscribe to TorGuard. I have the OpenVPN client running on multiple clients: iPad, Android phone, Windows 10 laptop, d-link 880l router with dd-wrt, ASUS RT-AC88U running the Merlin Build 380.62 alpha and a pfsense 2.3.2 appliance. You may want to consider changing to a VPN provider that supports more Firmware options if you can't find a solution to your problem.
The main reason TorGuard is my provider is they have figured out a way to get around the VPN blocks that were recently enforced by major streaming services. Whereas others could not.
Does this work with more recent boot loaders? What are your versions? Thanks.
I have moved away from DD-WRT for the most part. Not completely though. But I don't plan on using it in the future. One D-Link 880L is now an AP for my pfSense appliance. The other is in use at foundation. But they are not running OpenVPN. I had D-Link 880L and I bricked it when trying to do firmware upgrades past June 2016. In fact, I bricked it on many attempts. If you go to the D-Link 880L forum, you will see many of my posts there on my experiences of unbricking it. I had issues with cron and parental controls not working. And ipset is not supported.
Not sure what VPN provider the OP was using. But there are many that support ASUS Merlin. There are a lot of posts on snbforums.com of people that use PIA, TorGuard and BlackVPN among others. ASUS and ASUS Merlin firmware is based on Tomato. For the best OpenVPN performance, a top end CPU is the best. That is why I ended up going with the AC88U. It had the best CPU among consumer routers at the time I purchased it. I currently have a pfSense quad core 1.8Mhz and two AC88U's running OpenVPN Client. The pfSense gets slightly better performance. There are so many cool programs that people of wrote for the ASUS Merlin Firmware: hacker blocking, ad-blocking, malware-block, privacy-filter among many others. So, if it was me and I had an ASUS router, I would flash with ASUS Merlin, and use a VPN provider like TorGuard or PIA that supported the firmware.
i tried flashing from DD-WRt web interface, but it doesn't work
You have to put the router in recovery mode. I just did it on my rt-ac3100 so I could try rmerlin firmware. _________________ I am far from a guru, I'm barely a novice.
Posted: Fri Jul 28, 2017 23:34 Post subject: Thank You Xentrk
As the Subject says I wish to Thank Xentrk for this very useful post.
I too have a AC88U, still sealed in box, that I have been dying to use for a VPN.
Thank You Sir
Xentrk wrote:
beren wrote:
Does this work with more recent boot loaders? What are your versions? Thanks.
I have moved away from DD-WRT for the most part. Not completely though. But I don't plan on using it in the future. One D-Link 880L is now an AP for my pfSense appliance. The other is in use at foundation. But they are not running OpenVPN. I had D-Link 880L and I bricked it when trying to do firmware upgrades past June 2016. In fact, I bricked it on many attempts. If you go to the D-Link 880L forum, you will see many of my posts there on my experiences of unbricking it. I had issues with cron and parental controls not working. And ipset is not supported.
Not sure what VPN provider the OP was using. But there are many that support ASUS Merlin. There are a lot of posts on snbforums.com of people that use PIA, TorGuard and BlackVPN among others. ASUS and ASUS Merlin firmware is based on Tomato. For the best OpenVPN performance, a top end CPU is the best. That is why I ended up going with the AC88U. It had the best CPU among consumer routers at the time I purchased it. I currently have a pfSense quad core 1.8Mhz and two AC88U's running OpenVPN Client. The pfSense gets slightly better performance. There are so many cool programs that people of wrote for the ASUS Merlin Firmware: hacker blocking, ad-blocking, malware-block, privacy-filter among many others. So, if it was me and I had an ASUS router, I would flash with ASUS Merlin, and use a VPN provider like TorGuard or PIA that supported the firmware.
Thanx m8
