Asus RT-AC68U router, firmware, etc. (contd.)

Continuing a previous post of mine as a note to myself.

Tried to flash my Asus RT-AC68U with the Advanced Tomato firmware and that was a failed attempt. The router just kept rebooting. Turns out Advanced Tomato doesn’t work on the newer models. Bummer! Not that I particularly wanted Advanced Tomato. It looked good and I wanted to try it out, that’s all. Asus Merlin suits me just fine.

Quick shout out to “Yet another malware block script” which I’ve now got running on the Asus RT-AC68U. And I also came across and have installed AB-Solution which seems to be the equivalent of Pi-Hole but for routers. I got rid of Pi-Hole yesterday as I moved the Asus back to being my primary router (replacing the ISP provided one) and I didn’t want to depend on a separate machine for DNS etc. I wanted the Asus to do everything, including ad-blocking via DNS, so Googled on what alternatives are there for Asus and came across AB-Solution. Haven’t explored it much except for installing it. Came across it via this post.

That’s all for now!

As an aside, I feel so outdated using Linux nowadays. :( The last time I used Linux was 4-5 years ago – Debian and Fedora etc. Now most of the commands I am used to from those times don’t work any more. Even simple stuff like ifconfig or route print. It’s all System D based now. I had to reconfigure the IP address of this Debian VM where I installed Pi-Hole and I thought I could do it but for some reason I didn’t manage. (And no I didn’t read the docs! :p)

This is not to blame Linux or System D or progress or anything like that. Stuff changes. If I was used to Windows 2003 and came across Windows 2008 I’d be unused to it’s differences too – especially in the command line. Similarly from Server 2008 to 2012. It’s more a reflection of me being out of touch with Linux and now too lazy to try and get back on track. :)