RT-ac66R Limitations

Last weekend I bought an Asus RT-ac66R to replace a Netgear WNDR3700 (running DD-WRT) that had started forgetting its configuration.

The ac66R installed amazingly quickly providing basic Internet access in half an hour or so. This is obviously excellent.

I have found a number of limitations (compared to DD-WRT):

• It doesn't seem to provide a local DNS Server where the MAC address, IP address and hostname are entered and used for both dhcp and DNS.

• The Samba server doesn't seem to work with accounts. Windows file sharing works fine if accounts are not enabled. When I enable accounts, I can't authenticate.

• The GUI doesn't handle SSH.

It appears that DD-WRT provides these functions using Linux components (e.g., samba and DNSMasq) that are actually part of AsusWrt. This makes it surprising that they aren't included.

Would anyone have suggestions for dealing with these problems? Have I overlooked them somehow? Does the Merlin build solve any of these?

Thanks

Mike