Sell that thing on ebay and you should recoup enough to get a used mesh system.
That looks like the right thing and a pretty good price as well.
Although I wounder why it says it has a 1ghz CPU? I am guessing it is just wrong specs?
Some of them did come with 1ghz I believe. Asus changed them at some point in the run, so if you actually get a 1ghz model it is probably newer.
I know this amazon listing goes down to like $44 shipped every few weeks if you want to wait. It always shows up on slickdeals when it does.
This just popped up on ebay so I took a chance and snapped it up: ASUS AC1900 1300 Mbps 4-Port 10-Megabit Wireless AC Router (RTAC68P) for sale online | eBay
For $45 shipped I figure it is a worthwhile deal, looks to be in pretty good condition and people that keep the boxes generally take better care of their stuff. And it came in under my $50 budget.
I will let ya’ll know how it goes, I will be updating it to the full fat ASUS firmware for sure.
Anything to watch out for on that or just follow that guide and I should be good? How are people screwing it up?
I wondered if that was you! I got an alert that it was listed and by the time I clicked it was sold. Funny how that works.
Screwing up: I think some people skip the last step, then when Asus does an automatic update it reverts them back to a special version of of the Tmobile FW without SSH access, so they can’t get out of it. Make sure you do the last step to remove the Tmo partition altogether
lol, yep that was me. I just happened to be running through various search terms and it popped up and I knew I had to strike quick or loose it.
It should do what I need very well, It is even in Oklahoma so shipping should not take very long.
I also sent the seller a message and asked if he had ever flashed firmware on it and he says he never messed with anything except the wifi name and password so hopefully it is ready to be converted into an AC68U.
I will be sure to follow the guide all the way to the end.
Thanks for all the help everyone!
Sounds like you might have a winner. My only advice is that you follow the instructions exactly. You have to do the SSH stuff, then update to a specific firmware version, and then remove the partition. After that you are free to connect it to the internet pull the normal updates.
Ok, the router came in today and I proceeded to follow that guide you posted but strangely after I finished it still said it was a TM-AC1900 and not an AC68U?
I also do not have AImesh nor can I flash merlin?
No idea what might of went wrong, I followed the directions to the letter.
You didn’t run into any errors or anything that seemed off?
Nope, everything went smooth as silk, it simply came up as an AC1900 after it finished. I even flashed an updated AC68U firmware but it also came up AC1900 and it won’t flash merlin or any other firmware.
I also can’t get it into recovery mode anymore. Been doing some reading and can’t really make heads or tails of it.
Besides aimesh, what am I missing by using the tmobile firmware?
Sounds like you got reverted back to that “locked” FW I mentioned before.
I think there was talk that the Tmobile version doesn’t get as much support from Asus, but probably still better than most companies.
Might as well try it for a week and see how it suits you.
Sucks, so there is no way out once you get locked into this? Strange since it was never connected to the internet and I followed the directions. I wounder how it happened.
Large corporations have Google too. Maybe they broke it on purpose in the latest firmware.
Success!
Ok, after a few hours of messing with it, I kept digging deeper and deeper until I was trying to flash it from SSH.
It kept giving me errors with direct SSH flashing BUT Turns out if I backtracked and flashed the old firmware with SSH using the same commands from the guide it would “reset” to a point that flashing new firmwares worked, kinda. I could flash the firmware from the guide (or an older version of merlin from the link in a moment) via SSH.
Then from the stock firmware from the guild I could flash the latest AC68U firmware I got from this site
After that I was stuck again with an asus firmware that did not have AImesh or the merlin features and could not flash merlin from the web interface as it would give an error about the firmware not being for an AC1900.
So back to SSH I went.
I first copied the mtd-write and latest merlin firmware to root via SCP and then ran these comands:
chmod u+x mtd-write
mtd-write2 RT-AC68U_384.5_0.trx linux
After that I did the NVram reset and boom, it booted up into the latest merlin.
It still says AC1900 even with the latest merlin installed and no AImesh but it seems to have all the other features and is working perfectly near as I can tell. Still have not connected it to the internet yet, don’t think I will get time for that until tomorrow or the next day. I doubt I would use aimesh anyways since I don’t see me running Ethernet upstairs in this house and downstairs should be fine with a single router.
Now to try overclocking it and anything else I can do before installing it in the network.
Bravo!
Btw, no version of Merlin currently has Aimesh
Well that explains that, lol, lucky for me I would prefer the merlin features to aimesh anyways.
What features specifically?
lol, I have not messed around with it yet to see what all was added in merlin. I know the ability to overclock it and being able to see the CPU usage / temperature is nice.
Also the ability to add an ad-blocker to the router sounds very interesting, along with a torrent app that I saw mentioned. It looks like merlin also supports openVPN which works with my VPN, so that is nice as well.
I will dig into the settings later but as a rule I have found the mildly modded firmwares like this to be the best match for me over the years.
Hope you enjoy.
I also bought another Asus router the same day as you, so hopefully I get lucky.