Firmware update: Asuswrt-Merlin 380.64

Asus uses Tomato-derived firmware called Asuswrt for its newer routers, such as the RT-AC66U and RT-AC87U. This firmware is, with the exception of a few drivers, open source, whereby the closed binaries are included. Asuswrt-merlin, in turn, is a modified version of the original firmware from Asus. It includes bug fixes and minor improvements, but still tries to stay close to the original, so that it remains possible to add new features that Asus introduces to the code. Version 380.64 has been released and the most important changes that have been made are listed below for you.

The highlights of this release:

• New firmware availability notification. When a new firmware is available for download, there will be a flashing icon at the top of the webui. Going to the Firmware Upgrade page will display a popup containing the changelog, and a button that will take you directly to the download folder for your router model. You must still manually download and flash your firmware – for security reasons, online flashing is not implemented. The automated check is run every two days, and you can also manually launch the check from the Firmware Upgrade page (you can also select to check for the availability of beta firmware versions). Finally, the automated check can be completely disabled, under Tools -> Other Settings (there’s also a link to that setting on the Firmware Upgrade page).
• Component updates for OpenVPN, nano and curl.
• Tor will now route all TCP ports, not just 80/443.
• Improvements to the QoS Stats page: automatic refresh, and fixed the number rounding.
• Improvements to the IPTraffic charts: slices are now sorted, and the consolidated slices will always be the least active clients.
• Improvements to the webui performance – better cache handling, large static Javascript files are now cached.
• Download Master installers has been removed from the firmware image for models that still contained them. The latest packages are always downloaded from Asus’ servers at DM’s install time. This results in smaller firmware images for some models (for instance, the RT-AC88U firmware went from 44 MB to 33 MB)
• Security enhancements to the webui, to better protect against cross-site attacks (backport from Asus’s 4164 GPL)
• Webui fixes specific to Firefox (popup linked to the App icon at the top now works, JS errors when accessing the client list under certain situations was fixed)
• Fixes to the .ovpn config file import (crash on invalid key/certs, misconfigured HMAC setting)