I've got a pretty good WiFi router in the Cisco WRT160NL, but it frequently has trouble reaching out of the house into the yard, and even into the farther reaches inside the house. Also, I wanted a little more speed and power, and the ASUS RT-AC68U offered that.

So I bought one.

Don't get me wrong, the Cisco is a pretty good router. I guess I said that already. It's always given me good WiFi connectivity and pretty good speed. I put DD-WRT on it almost right away in order to play with IPv6. It did all of that well. As mentioned, though, it's often had toruble with its range. More accurately, it worked great when in its range, and not at all outside its range, but its range wasn't all I wanted it to be.

Recently, I've found that even within the house I'll lose connectivity, which can usually be re-invigorated by walking back a few feet, connecting to the router's control panel and rebooting it. The reboot will cause or allow the router's range to improve for a while, usually a few days or weeks.

The ASUS has been intriguing since I read of its introduction. I've even successfully recommended it to a few people (in that they asked, I suggested, they bought, and are happy with it). I didn't have a reason to upgrade, though, 'cause the Cisco was working well enough. That and the ASUS costs a couple hundred bucks. As I was poking around, I noticed that there was a price break, free shipping, and I happened to have an unused gift card that brought its price back down around where I could accept the cost without crisis. Amazon sent it the day I ordered it, and it arrived a day earlier than the estimate, which was all handy.

I'd found and played with the ASUSWRT example and found it to be pretty robust. Shortly after having installed the router, I had it added to the network and configured. I configured it with a separate ID, so I could bounce back and forth testing. In general, it seemed to be working out well, but it had its quirks.

At first it seemed to be the case that it wasn't giving out IP addresses. Head-slapper, of course it was because I had another DHCP server enabled on the network (on the Cisco). This was a little more head-slappy than I thought, because I was fully expecting that router to be the first device a connecting WiFi client would talk to, but that seems to not be the case. I disabled the other server, reconnected my device, and received an address from the new router's pool, and more importantly, the devices were configured to use the new router as their gateway.

Alas, I couldn't get to the Internet from the WAN-connected devices. After a little tweaking, it turned out that the ISP-provided modem/router wasn't showing the new router's WAN address in its list of connected computers. I could ping the router's interface, but not get through. Some tinkering and it turns out I need to enable ping for it to be visible in the list, but while changing the ping setting allowed the router to be listed, it didn't correct the connectivity issue. I did the loathsome and rebooted the ISP router. That did the trick; now machines with DHCP addresses from the new router could now reach the Internet!

Nicely, the ASUSWRT even has native support for my IPv6 tunnel, and after changing the IP on my tunnelbroker.net configuration, was able to participate; in that I could still ping my WAN IP from the broker's site. However, I couldn't get IPv6 addresses on my test devices. I couldn't see where to configure the router advertising, just a spot to enable it. IPv6 is a bit of an experiment, so I put that off.

All was swell until I tried changing the gateway on statically-addressed machines to use the new router. They could not get through.  Oddly, I couldn't get my desktop to get a DHCP address, either. Since it's statically addressed, I don't allow the network manager to manage the configuration, so it could have been something on my end, but I'm not convinced.

At the end of that first day's adventures, I left both WiFi devices on, so everything could get to the Internet.

The next day I spent a bit of time trying to get the gateway to work for the static machines, but really just couldn't. I found a forum post that suggested the router didn't handle addresses outside of its assigned DHCP address pool. This sounded ludicrous, but it did happen that when I changed the static IP to be within the pool, it routed (even though the router could have seen that it didn't lease the address...). I couldn't verify the behavior changed by turning off the pool; that is, when I turned off the pool, I had the same behavior.

This was unacceptable, and with the IPv6 failure (and waning patience), I decided to put DD-WRT on the new router as well. The installation was pretty easy. I found the firmware build for my router, went to the router's upgrade page, selected the firmware I downloaded, waited a moment while it rebooted, and I was off.

The only trouble I had with DD-WRT was that the administration page that contains some of the settings I needed to toggle (like enabling SSH access) also have an area to set the username and password. It seems my browser decided to auto-fill the fields, and inadvertently changed the name; I had to reset the router to "factory," which neatly cleared the NVRAM settings, but left the firmware in place, and started over with the configuration. Thereafter, I made sure to set the user and password to what I expected each time I had to change something on that page.

A quick dash through the network settings and the new firmware was back and running, providing DHCP addresses and allowing WiFi connections. Alas, again, traffic couldn't get through the ISP router. a little poking and searching revealed that the new firmware gave the router a new MAC address. I knew from previous experience that the ISP router doesn't like it when a device tries to use the same IP with different MAC addresses; in that case, I was replacing one router with another but tried to reuse an IP, while in this case, I'd reconfigured the new firmware with the same IP as the old firmware on the same router. I had expected the MAC address to use a hardware address, but that doesn't seem to be what happened.

I changed the IP, made sure ping was enabled, and tried again. The ISP router could see the device, but traffic still wasn't getting through. I rebooted the ISP router, and then, finally, it was working again.

This time, though, static devices worked, too!

I re-added my IPv6 script and tried to get that to work. It oddly didn't. I could ping my tunnel provider from the device, but couldn't get addresses on other devices. I poked and found a newer "milestone" build that had a comment about fixing IPv6, so I re-flashed to that and suddenly it all worked.

I renamed my WiFi networks on the new router to be the same as the old router, unplugged the old one, and let the devices expire and gain new addresses in their own time.

Now I've got my ASUS plugged into the network, the Cisco dark next to it. The more advanced devices get the 5GHz connection, giving them (allegedly) speeds approaching 300Mb/s. Even the less advanced devices, stuck with the 2.4GHz connection, gain from better range. I can now maintain my WiFi connection into the garage, which is about as far on the yard as you can get from the router in the house.