I’ve been having a frustrating problem with my Toronto-AC (currently running v2.4.5 firmware) for some months now, although it seems to be more frequent as of late.
After a relatively short period — perhaps a few hours or less — of last cold-booting, the remote management feature through pcwrt.com stops working, although the router otherwise works exactly as normal. If I connect to the Toronto-AC’s own network, I can browse the web and access the admin interface, but if I use another device outside of the Toronto-AC’s network, the remote management interface remains inaccessible, reporting “Oops! Failed to retrieve data.”
If I power-cycle the router, immediately that it has finished booting back up, the remote management instantly works again. But within a few hours, it will usually be back to not responding again.
I’d really prefer not to have to connect to the Toronto-AC’s network every time my son asks for a site to be whitelisted, but nor do I want to have to get up and walk through to the router to power-cycle it multiple times per day. So I’d really like to know what I can do to help troubleshoot this very, very regular issue.
Here’s the reason I don’t want to connect my machine to the Toronto-AC directly to access admin: The Toronto-AC is used only by my son, and piggybacks off my own router, which is an Asus RT-N66U running FreshTomato firmware. (Both routers are placed at a good distance from each other and don’t interfere with each other.) All of my devices connect directly to my Asus router.
If I’m trying to whitelist sites / apps for my son, which is by far the most frequent reason I need to access its admin interface, I need to be able to identify which specific servers are being blocked from the Access Control logs. But if I connect my own machine to his network, the log immediately gets cluttered up with a bunch of my work-related apps all trying to connect from his network and being blocked. (Which, btw, it would be *really* nice if there was an option to just clear the log without having to reboot the whole router. But I digress…)
So I would really prefer to be able to just use the remote management via cloud for all except application of firmware upgrades, which I understand could be a security risk if those were enabled via the cloud.
So what can I do to help troubleshoot this problem? It is *extremely* common, so I will have no problems replicating it. Is there any way I can capture a log from the router before rebooting it, or anything else of the sort, to help you fix this remote management bug?
Many thanks in advance for any help or advice you can offer!
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