Nighthawk X6 CFW Issues

[god_bmxes]

Hello all, I have recently been messing around with CFW's on my Netgear R8000 (Nighthawk X6). I had bought the router a few years back when our ISP moved to gigabit internet, the router performed greeat and I had little to no issues. Now about a week ago I started having issues playing a game on PC and could not get it to get an open NAT type in the game. I was at my whitt's end so I tried a CFW (Tomato) and after fidling with the settings it was able to get me an open NAT type in the game. Now the issue then arrised a few days later when I attempted to see what the LAN speeds were on my desktop and I hit a hard wall at 500, looked through settings, googled the issue, heck I posted on here and even on the site I got the CFW from and I could not get anything to work. So after waiting for some replies and last ditch efforts over a week I started to try other firmwares and now I have also tried dd-wrt and Kong Mod aswell, I am having the same issues as before with the hard wall around 500 or so Mbp/s. So now I think that it might be related to CFW's not being able to use hardware acceleration and that could be the reason why only Netgear's stock firmware is the only one that could give me gig speeds. So to get to the question, is there a way to get a CFW to 1 gig speeds or no, if not I am thinking of building a PfSense box as I have some half decent old hardware laying around (Xeon X5650 on an Asus board) but I am not sure if it will be worth it with that as the router. Another thing I was thinking since at thet point I would only be using my router as a switch should I get a small gig switch and use my router as an access point only? I really like the crazy customization on Tomato and don't wanna go back to the stock netgear stuff so anything is better than it as long as I can keep my gigabit lan! Also sorry for the story...

 

TL;DR: Want to know what is the best option, PFsense routrer and X6 as a AP or Gigabit switch and X6 as AP or how to get gig out of CFW options on the X6

[god_bmxes]

Also it should be mentioned that I plan on getting a server in the upcoming months which will be rack mounted so a switch might be bought anyway when the server is bought

[Falconevo]

8 hours ago, god_bmxes said:

Hello all, I have recently been messing around with CFW's on my Netgear R8000 (Nighthawk X6). I had bought the router a few years back when our ISP moved to gigabit internet, the router performed greeat and I had little to no issues. Now about a week ago I started having issues playing a game on PC and could not get it to get an open NAT type in the game. I was at my whitt's end so I tried a CFW (Tomato) and after fidling with the settings it was able to get me an open NAT type in the game. Now the issue then arrised a few days later when I attempted to see what the LAN speeds were on my desktop and I hit a hard wall at 500, looked through settings, googled the issue, heck I posted on here and even on the site I got the CFW from and I could not get anything to work. So after waiting for some replies and last ditch efforts over a week I started to try other firmwares and now I have also tried dd-wrt and Kong Mod aswell, I am having the same issues as before with the hard wall around 500 or so Mbp/s. So now I think that it might be related to CFW's not being able to use hardware acceleration and that could be the reason why only Netgear's stock firmware is the only one that could give me gig speeds. So to get to the question, is there a way to get a CFW to 1 gig speeds or no, if not I am thinking of building a PfSense box as I have some half decent old hardware laying around (Xeon X5650 on an Asus board) but I am not sure if it will be worth it with that as the router. Another thing I was thinking since at thet point I would only be using my router as a switch should I get a small gig switch and use my router as an access point only? I really like the crazy customization on Tomato and don't wanna go back to the stock netgear stuff so anything is better than it as long as I can keep my gigabit lan! Also sorry for the story...

 

TL;DR: Want to know what is the best option, PFsense routrer and X6 as a AP or Gigabit switch and X6 as AP or how to get gig out of CFW options on the X6

Personally I am always going to advocate using pfSense over residential routers due to the feature set of the software.  You can use the X6 as the access point, most routers handle this just fine but I have come across some asus ones that needed DHCP port triggering or DHCP forwarding setup to allow IPs that were not on the asus dhcp pool to be provided via the WiFi connectivity.  Test it and if you can't get an IP via the WiFi connection but can get an IP on the lan ports then add DHCP trigger/forwarding.

 

I mentioned in the previous post it looks like the hardware accel has been disabled and everything is being pushed to the main processing cores which is why you would feel like a hard bottleneck is in place.  I imagine it has header data split offload, Large recieve offload and all of the checksum offloading is disabled on the custom firmware or theres a bug preventing it being used.

 

Sounds like you have the hardware already, stick to Intel network interfaces with pfSense as they have a more mature driver.

[god_bmxes]

@Falconevo  I am seriously thinking of building the router but the only thing I am wondering is what would happen if I had no router and just a switch and WAPs? I can build a router though pretty easily but for a temp setup I am thinking of getting a small 4 or 8 port switch to rout out to my PC and othr wired devices so I can get the speeds on LAN I want and them have the router as a device off of the switch to handle the wifi, how would that work?

[Falconevo]

Just purchase an unmanaged switch for the wired connections and wireless access point for the WiFi connections.  Everything will sit on a flat VLAN (1), if you want to do more advanced networking and utilise VLANs at a later date/time then buy a managed or smart switch.

 

ISP Modem > pfSense > Switch > Wired Clients

                                            \ WiFi Access Point > WiFi clients

[Alex Atkin UK]

12 hours ago, Falconevo said:

Just purchase an unmanaged switch for the wired connections and wireless access point for the WiFi connections.  Everything will sit on a flat VLAN (1), if you want to do more advanced networking and utilise VLANs at a later date/time then buy a managed or smart switch.

 

ISP Modem > pfSense > Switch > Wired Clients

                                            \ WiFi Access Point > WiFi clients

It sounds like WiFi is probably fine on the router they have, so not really necessary to resort to a separate WiFi AP at this point.

If they DO switch to pfSense, they can continue to use this router as the access point too.

 

It sounds like what is happening right now is for some reason LAN traffic is using a software bridge instead of the hardware one, so its hitting the speed limit of the routers CPU.  A switch alone should solve that.

[Falconevo]

22 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

It sounds like WiFi is probably fine on the router they have, so not really necessary to resort to a separate WiFi AP at this point.

If they DO switch to pfSense, they can continue to use this router as the access point too.

 

It sounds like what is happening right now is for some reason LAN traffic is using a software bridge instead of the hardware one, so its hitting the speed limit of the routers CPU.  A switch alone should solve that.

I told him to use the X6 as the access point... no point binning it, read my original reply.

[Alex Atkin UK]

8 hours ago, Falconevo said:

I told him to use the X6 as the access point... no point binning it, read my original reply.

My intent was just to clarify that the existing router seems fine as it is, the only problem seems to be the lack of acting as a hardware switch for some reason.

I would totally recommend pfSense, but if the existing router is fine for their current usage then its worth considering that unless you go for an Atom motherboard, its likely to use at least three times as much electricity as a consumer router.

Also in your later comment you said "wireless access point for the WiFi" which again I was just clarifying that their existing router should be fine for this purpose as it could be misinterpreted as a revised recommendation to buy a new device.  Not everyone understands that a WiFi Access Point and a router are effectively the same thing.

[god_bmxes]

So late response but over the weekend I switched back to the stock firmware on the router, it was the lack of hardware acceleration that made the internet download so slow. I will probably move to a pfsense style router in the future when I get a server setup going but for right now I will just deal with the stock netgear router. Thanks for the help @Falconevoand @Alex Atkin UK

[Alex Atkin UK]

While its a common issue to have NAT slow down with CFW I'm a bit puzzled on this one as aren't Netgear supposed to have a deal with DD-WRT which allows them to implement hardware acceleration?

Its particularly unusual that it was the Switch part that was causing issues as that is almost always supported.  It would seem really odd for them to cheap out and not include a hardware switch chip in this expensive device.

Still, pfSense is the best option IMO as its this sort of hassle that caused me to first switch to OpenWRT on x86 via a custom build someone made, then when they decided not to support it any more move to pfSense.