The IT Nerd

So I have been spending the last week working on trying to understand why the latest ASUS firmware for the ZenWifi XT8 is such a dumpster fire of a firmware. When I initially updated to it, it was so bad that I put out a PSA telling people not to upgrade to it. And to frank, even though I have things working now, that PSA will still stand because of a couple of reasons.

The first reason is that this firmware, which is version 3.0.0.4.388.23285, seems not to play nice with the advanced DMZ functionality of the Bell HH4000. Specifically the ASUS ZenWifi XT8 would get an external IP address from the HH4000, but the HH4000 would give the ZenWifi XT8 a self assigned address which looks like 169.xxx.xxx.xxx. If you see an address like this, it means that whatever device has this address will not be able to communicate with other devices on your local network or to the Internet properly, if at all. However on the previous version of the firmware which is 3.0.0.4.388.23012, I could not reproduce this issue. How I ultimately fixed this with the new firmware installed was to completely undo the advanced DMZ setup. Then reboot the HH4000. Followed by removing all the entries from the DHCP table in the HH4000. Rebooting again. Then redoing the advanced DMZ setup. Since no other ASUS firmware has required me to go through these gymnastics to make everything work after the firmware update, logic suggests that this is clearly a bug in the 3.0.0.4.388.23285 version of the ASUS firmware. Though to be fair to ASUS, this is likely a use case that they don’t test.

The second reason is that DNS resolution for reasons that I do not understand seems to be problematic. Before I get into why I say that, let me give you a quick lesson on DNS. When you go to a website, say http://www.itnerd.blog, your computer or smart phone has to ask a server called a Domain Name Server for the address of that website. And that server will respond with the exact address. Now that process should be milliseconds to do. But I was finding that it was taking 5 to 10 seconds for that to happen. Now I never use the DNS servers for any ISP that I do business with as ISPs have been known to track your activities and sell that information to third parties. Instead I normally use the Canadian Shield DNS service. But with this firmware, I could not do that. Instead, I had to use Quad 9 which is one of the list of pre-defined DNS services that are baked into ASUS routers. While I do get the same result which is to keep my browsing history private from my ISP, I question why I am no longer able to use Canadian Shield on my ZenWiFi XT8. I say that because as part of my troubleshooting I went back to the previous firmware which is 3.0.0.4.388.23012 and I was not able to reproduce this issue. That again implies that this firmware has an issue of some sort of issue with entering your own DNS settings.

One other thing that I should mention is that as another troubleshooting step, I factory reset the router and set it up from scratch rather than restoring the configuration from a backup. I did that because I thought that the backup might have been the issue. But as you can see above, that wasn’t the case.

The bottom line is this: While I do have things working at present with version 3.0.0.4.388.23285, I cannot recommend that any ASUS ZenWiFi XT8 user upgrade to this version. And this experience underlines the fact that ASUS really has issues with their firmware and their upgrade process that they really need to get sorted sooner rather than later. On top of issues like the ones above that managed to get out of their QA lab into the public domain, the fact I have to recommend that ASUS users reset their router config and redo it either via a backup file or from scratch when said user does a firmware upgrade makes zero sense. No other consumer or prosumer router works that way. And that reflects poorly on ASUS. This is why I have as of late been recommending Netgear and Linksys routers. With both of those brands, I am able to install them and forget about them so to speak. And ASUS needs to be in that camp or they will lose customers due to the fact that ease of setup and ease of use are thing that really matter to customers.

This entry was posted on June 11, 2023 at 8:55 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Asus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.