I recently moved houses and brought my Slate AX with me. A good time to upgrade firmware, I thought - I was running 4.4.x, upgraded first to 4.5.16 and then 4.6.0 May 9 snapshot.
On both of these firmwares, the router is not capable of presenting a stable 2.4GHz wifi network, fresh after a factory reset.
If I watch my wifi analyzer app, the 2.4GHz network appears, remains for a few scan cycles, and then disappears, over and over and over. This is true with the default settings for the 2.4GHz network, right after a factory reset, having touched nothing other than setting an admin password.
Every other device my scanner can see, remains visible for 100% of scan cycles, and does not appear and disappear as Slate AX does in this way.
At this point I’ve owned many GL.iNet products and have been a daily user of GL.iNet products for close to 5 years, and I’m getting really tired of the poor software quality. Slate AX, Flint 1, and Beryl AX are plagued with problems, and that’s just the start.
Honestly I think I just needed to vent, and I’m past it. I was trying to set up a wireless bridge between Slate AX and Beryl AX, and started remembering that my oddly specific bridge configuration from the last setup with these 2 devices was odd for a reason, so I switched back to 5GHz band + 40MHz channels, and then the bridge was working and I shut off the 2.4GHz network and was off to see why manually specified hostnames weren’t resolving.
It’s just frustrating at times, these devices would be an unbelievable value if more of the features were fully stable, and if there weren’t quite so many random bottomless-pit type bugs, like the fact that one STILL can end up at a HTTP (non-HTTPS) Luci login screen where the correct root password doesn’t work, a random hole waiting to swallow noob users alive for almost five years now on every GLi device I’ve ever owned.
WPA3 doesn’t work breaks things if it’s turned on. Wide channels are buggy. 2.4GHz is buggy on some devices. The 4.5.x firmwares exhibit “flapping” behavior in wifi network visibility on some devices.
It is what it is. I’m in the “please fix bugs before adding more features” camp, always and forever. Imagine how amazing GLi products would be if you didn’t have to tinker with them for between 2 and 42 hours to find the exact right combo of settings which results in rock solid stability.
I really wish they had a(n English) bug tracker, but I understand why they don’t.