Multiple Asus Routers Out of Memory Problems on May 17, 2023
Posted: Thu May 18, 2023 2:38 pm
My own router Asus (AC68U) and another family member (with ASUS AX55) started to have internet issues yesterday. Funny thing is we have different ISPs (different areas of the city) so I was able to track it down to the fact we both had ASUS routers. As soon as I started Google search I started to find other issues with Asus routers on May 17th as well.
It finally got me to look at my log file to see tons of these errors:
May 17 12:06:41 dnsmasq-dhcp[2631]: failed to write /var/lib/misc/dnsmasq.leases: No space left on device (retry in 60s)
The usual powering down and starting the router back up was only working for a few hours for my router and 10 minutes for the AX55. It leads me to believe the log file isn't cleared from memory (which surprises me a bit).
Solution (for now): Both of the firmware versions were not up to date so on both routers was able to download and update the firmware. This seems to have bought enough space for now to avoid the router from going down.
But this leaves me with so many questions...why did this happen on multiple models on May 17th? Is it the date or is it something else?
Why can't you purge the log file directly (I've only seen evidence of doing things like a factory reset and even that doesn't always work)?
I've also seen 3rd party firmware (WRT) that's generating the same error filling up the log file? How can this be?
Is there some easy to install software that can more directly manage log files and such on the device? One thing I've done is try to turn off things like Traffic monitor and just collect less stats in general. The DHCP error though, I feel like that's fairly hard to turn off renewing those DHCP on devices. Maybe this leads to motivation to make things as much static IP as possible (but just silly to have to resort to this).
I'm nowhere near technical enough to know why this is happening but man this is just brutal. Can I expect this will be fixed in a soon to be released firmware update or will this be an ongoing issue?
EDIT: One potential solution I found a reference to is using one of the USB slots to house a hard drive where some files can be saved instead of into memory. Would need to research this further...
It finally got me to look at my log file to see tons of these errors:
May 17 12:06:41 dnsmasq-dhcp[2631]: failed to write /var/lib/misc/dnsmasq.leases: No space left on device (retry in 60s)
The usual powering down and starting the router back up was only working for a few hours for my router and 10 minutes for the AX55. It leads me to believe the log file isn't cleared from memory (which surprises me a bit).
Solution (for now): Both of the firmware versions were not up to date so on both routers was able to download and update the firmware. This seems to have bought enough space for now to avoid the router from going down.
But this leaves me with so many questions...why did this happen on multiple models on May 17th? Is it the date or is it something else?
Why can't you purge the log file directly (I've only seen evidence of doing things like a factory reset and even that doesn't always work)?
I've also seen 3rd party firmware (WRT) that's generating the same error filling up the log file? How can this be?
Is there some easy to install software that can more directly manage log files and such on the device? One thing I've done is try to turn off things like Traffic monitor and just collect less stats in general. The DHCP error though, I feel like that's fairly hard to turn off renewing those DHCP on devices. Maybe this leads to motivation to make things as much static IP as possible (but just silly to have to resort to this).
I'm nowhere near technical enough to know why this is happening but man this is just brutal. Can I expect this will be fixed in a soon to be released firmware update or will this be an ongoing issue?
EDIT: One potential solution I found a reference to is using one of the USB slots to house a hard drive where some files can be saved instead of into memory. Would need to research this further...