Asuswrt-Merlin 374.40 is out

Greetings,

Asuswrt-Merlin 374.40 is now available for download. This release mostly focused on integrating the latest Asus GPL (with its security fixes), polishing DNSFilter, and fixing various bugs.

IMPORTANT: The RT-AC68U build is still unstable. Neither Asus nor myself have been successful in tracking down the cause yet. For this reason, the 374.40 release for the AC68U will be labeled as 374.40-beta3. Some people aren't affected by the issue (only two reboots over the course of two weeks for myself), but for the rest, 374.40-alpha4 remains the last known stable build.

The noteworthy bits:

• From now on, version numbering has been shortened (for example this release is 374.40).
• Merges with Asus's 374_4561 GPL code, which includes a few security and general bug fixes
• The new security notification system has been partly disabled, as it was leading to way too many support requests. You won't be warned about sharing being left open without accounts (but the notification about the admin password still being left to its default is still active). Security is just as much a user's job as a programmer's job - be responsible in how you configure any sharing service. Review your settings rather than blindly use any default settings.
• DNSFilter has been further polished, various issues present in its first release have been resolved. More filtering services have been implemented, along with the possibility of providing your own custom DNS IPs.
• On the model-specific front, the RT-N16 build has been fixed. Also, the RT-N66U default build is now the EM one.
• Various IPv6 tweaks and fixes, provided by kdarbyshirebryant, pinwing and saintdev.
• A lot of fixes were made to the Networkmap service (which builds and displays the list of connected clients), which should resolve most issues (including the compatibility issue with Windows Home Server).

Changelog is here.
Downloads are here.

What's coming next?

I'm taking a break. The past few months have been almost exclusively devoted in tracking down and fixing issues introduced in recent Asus releases (and I couldn't skip on these new versions as they always contained fixes for the previous release, including important security fixes). This has started to become a tedious chore, so I'm going to sit back and wait for them to settle things down a bit before I resume merging code in. Hopefully now that they got the recent security issues out of the way, they will be able to spend more time doing QA testing on firmware releases rather than having to rush them out to address the more important issues, so the next release will be more stable.

Aside from the AC68U case, other models are in a fairly good state now with 374.40, so things shouldn't be that bad at this current release.

Enjoy!