Well it depends on how much you pay for it. Right now we have a promo in Canada for the Linksys recertified EA6900 C$69.99 with free shipping, about US$57. Not a bad price for a solid router if you are able to tweak it. I bought one and it should arrive on Monday, going to test it with Asuswrt firmware or Tomota.
We don't have such prices in Europe - even with a promo! Multiply yours at least by 3 (~$180) plus delivery (~$10), and then price does not matter - you just want a stable working router without additional headache.
Hi guys,
Did a quick search of dd-wrt and I wasn't able to find anything on the topic of EA6900+dd-wrt = no AC connection.
So, I was wondering if anyone else is not able to trigger a 802.11ac connection from the EA6900 after flashing the latest dd-wrt (30 May 2015) yesterday - I only seem to be able to get a 802.11n signal.
I would like to take the opportunity to thank all the fellow dd-wrt contributors for their excellent problem solving skills. Thanks to you, I managed to flash the Asus CFE to my EA6900 device, along with the latest DD-WRT version and it is working perfectly, no NVRAM issues or anything.
You guys are great! Keep up the good work! If there is anything that I can do to help you guys out, please let me know.
Just a FYI, i've been adding stuff to the caveats and little notes to critical steps in my post. Hope it helps. Although I feel bad that my post has caused some grief for some users, it's important to reiterate that running dd-wrt on the ea6900 will not be perfect.
I got mine for cheap ($70 CAD), and I do not needs the USB ports as I have a real NAS on my network. I picked DD-WRT because it's suppose to have beam forming support (something tomato by shibby doesn't have. Not sure about AsusWRT/Merlin).
So for me, this router was an affordable way to expand my wireless network, get AC support (although I don't actually have any AC clients yet), and allow me to maintain all my dd-wrt customizations that I rely on.
If i follow your instructions, do i still have the duplicate mac addresses problem? or do your radio's each have a unique mac address?
the 2.4ghz and 5ghz radios have different MACs with my hardware and instructions. the only time I've seen the two radios get the same mac address is when I was running tomato by shibby and I rebooted a few times and noticed.
BTW guys, I just spent the night fixing (unsuccessfully) the router.
The bad symptoms started when the router just wouldn't lease a new IP from my cable modem. I plugged my laptop straight into the modem and it was fine. I plugged my old router directly and it was fine and leased an IP. I started rebooting a bunch of times trying to get it to lease and then suddenly the webgui started refusing connections. WTF... I telnet'd in and looked at the process list and for some reason httpd was running on port 0 with two spaces in between... "httpd -p__0" I've used underscores instead of spaces for visual impact.
HMMMM.... does this mean I'm still being affected by the nvram bug? I do a hexdump and everything looks fine. No "00 00" near address 8000. But my nvram is running high at ~47k. I suspect all the reboots just started corrupting everything.
I tried desperately to try to fix the broken webgui. I started disabling my firewall scripts, removing some VAP's, and eventually the only thing that seems to work is by toggling the WAN to disabled and then back to auto DHCP. BAM it's working again. ??? but I still can't lease an IP. I notice that some of my wireless parameters are also messed up. can't seem to set wl1.0 to a specific channel. then the regulatory domain suddenly goes to afganistan. i keep rebooting and power cycling with every config change. This can't be good. I try restoring from a previous nvram backup I took shortly after getting it "working". still no IP lease. sigh....
So I've reverted back to my old WRT400N setup (thank god I did a nvram backup of my old router as I had configured it to be a bridge) and I think I'm going to flash the CFE back to linksys and install the stock FW to get it ready to return.
If anyone has any advice, I'm happy to hear it. I have a few more days left in the return policy.
Looks very much like nvram is corrupted, but not necessarily by the 32k bug. Does the size of nvram (shown by nvram show) change between reboots of the router? If yes, then it is likely the 32k bug. However, I saw someone had jffs partition overwriting the nvram (not sure why, but perhaps due to misconfiguration): http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=283371
Looks very much like nvram is corrupted, but not necessarily by the 32k bug. Does the size of nvram (shown by nvram show) change between reboots of the router? If yes, then it is likely the 32k bug. However, I saw someone had jffs partition overwriting the nvram (not sure why, but perhaps due to misconfiguration): http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=283371
I was running r27086 and I didn't see anything particularly bad about that build... I don't think it's related to jffs (at least the issue reported in your link). The config always remained the same after reboots except for little small bugs/changes. It never reverted back to stock.
As for nvram, doesn't it always change between reboots? between keeping dhcp entries in nvram, and other moving parts, the nvram constantly grows and shrinks. It's not changing a huge amount between reboots (maybe a couple hundred bytes).
I'm now trying xvortex's xwrt-merlin fw. will see how that goes for a few days. plus I've demoted it to be a regular wireless access point and kept the main routing duties to my (somewhat) trusted wrt400n running dd-wrt... Only have a few days left!
Don't think DHCP entries are stored constantly in nvram. I believe, it is only ttraff daemon, which accumulates info in nvram. If you want to know for sure, you can compare nvram variables one by one before and after reboot. You can use my script from page 24 for this purpose:
http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=178138&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=345
I didn't mean build 27086 was bad - the link was just an example to show that other issues are possible with nvram besides the 32k bug.
I have trouble getting my ea-6900 to run dd-wrt again. I write again because it worked fine the first time. I installed linksys-ea6900-webflash-23204.bin using the linksys firmware web install and dd-wrt showed up just fine. Then I upgraded dd-wrt to linksys-ea6900-webflash-27456.bin using dd-wrt firmware web install. I didn't notice at the time that this didn't work (still the old dd-wrt was booting). I configured the router as a wireless bridge (which worked). Later I discovered the old firmware and updated it. I made no factory reset prior to the upgrade(!)
This caused my router to go into an endless reboot cycle. When I ping, I get the TTL=100 response for approx 40 seconds and then the router reboots again and again.
I have tried flashing the old dd-wrt again (using tftp) but that didn't help (kernel reboots before upload finishes). I managed to flash the official linksys firmware (much smaller then dd-wrt) and the router appeared normal (functional) again. All well and good I thought.
But when I flash dd-wrt v23204 again, it enters the infinite reboot cycle (ping TTL=100 response). I have tried making a factory reset in the linksys firmware prior to the dd-wrt flashing, but it doesn't help. I need to reset the settings of dd-wrt without losing all nvram (I only have backup of the CFE, not the nvram).
Suggestions to reset nvram without losing the unique settings for this particular router? I guess it has to be done with the linksys firmware as it is the only one working. :-/
Edit: The firmware reset actually stopped the infinite reboots, leaving dd-wrt with a strange configuration. There is no web-gui and no telnet response on any IP the router had. The wifi announces itself as the linksys default names. But the situation is the same: I need to reset the configuration somehow.
I don't know if you guys know it (didn't read all 50 pages), but the original linksys firmware seems to give access to its settings as a file. The file is actually a tar.gz file after you have removed the first two lines of the file.
In it there is a file called syscfg.tmp which contains many 0-terminated strings (use Notepad++ to search/replace \0 -> \n) to get a clear list of strings. Can anyone tell me if these settings are what the nvram contains? Of so, we should be able to restore the nvram using the official linksys firmware.
This may of course all be old hat to your guys, but I am stuck with the original firmware until I can fix my nvram somehow...
dd-wrt firmware for EA6900 keeps all original nvram variables (including unique hardware ones) and restores them to their defaults at boot time, if variable 0:aa2g is missing. So to recover you could flash again linksys-ea6900-webflash-23204.bin (or 23194) and then run those commands from telnet:
Code:
nvram delete 0:aa2g
nvram commit
reboot
I belive, your problem was related with the 32k bug. It is widely discussed in this thread. In brief, you should make sure that nvram size does not increase beyond 32k by not adding too much settings. Currently, the only way to get rid of this bug is to use CFE from ASUS RT-AC68U, which is a router with essentially the same hardware.
