TheUnboundDeveloper/AM-Reaper v3.1.7-beta-RT-BE88U

Reaper v3.1.7-beta — RT-BE88U

on GitHub

v3.1.7 — the firewall says whether it is actually doing what you asked, and three things that wasted your time stop doing it

• A new Rule Status tab tells you whether the firewall keeps its promises. v3.1.6 made a refused
  filter table loud and survivable; this release answers the question that came after it — is the
  table that did load actually doing what the pages say? Reading a few hundred rules to find out is
  not a reasonable thing to ask of anyone, so the router does it. Every feature owns a handful of
  witness packets: an ingress interface, addresses, a protocol and port, a connection state, and
  the verdict the feature promises. After every firewall change the router walks each one through the
  live tables in kernel order and reports the verdict along with the rule that decided it. Green
  means the promise holds. Red means the tables do not deliver it, and the rule column names what
  caught the packet. The worked example is the one that motivated the whole thing: a
  Gatekeeper-blocked device must not reach the internet and must still resolve names at the router
  — if that second row turns red, the DNS carve-out is sitting behind the block, and you can see
  which rule did it instead of inferring it. Rows marked depends sit behind a match the walker does
  not model (string, time, policy, u32) and are honestly reported as unjudged rather than guessed;
  n/a means the router has no such network yet. Nothing on the tab changes a rule — the walker only
  reads. On the RT-BE96U it walks 944 rules in under a second.
• The verdict now reaches you without going looking for it. Every surface the walker fed at first
  was one you had to already be looking at, and a clean walk is silent by design, so a red witness
  could stand for days unseen. The dashboard's Security card now carries a Rule Status row, and
  the Firewall page's Status tab a one-line summary; both link straight to the detail. Both read the
  cached report rather than starting a walk of their own, so watching costs nothing.
• The firewall now checks your VPN kill switch is actually there. A kill switch is the one
  setting whose whole job is to fail closed, and it was the one thing the new Rule Status tab could
  not see: it is not a firewall rule at all but a routing rule, so walking the firewall tables could
  never find it. A kill switch that quietly failed to install looked exactly like one that was
  working. The walker now reads the routing table as well, and says plainly whether a marked
  connection has anywhere to go when its tunnel drops. Coverage across the whole catalog went from 33
  checks to 45 in this release, including: a port forward restricted to certain sources is tested
  from a source it should refuse, not only from one it should allow; a Gatekeeper-blocked device is
  checked to still reach the router's own admin page, so blocking a device can never lock you out of
  the box; and a redirected service is checked that the machine it redirects to can still reach the
  real thing, which is the failure that takes the service down for everyone while the obvious check
  still reads green.
• A broken promise now finds you, wherever you are. The count of firewall checks that are failing
  sits next to Firewall in the sidebar, on every page, until it is cleared. Nothing is shown when
  everything holds — a permanent "0" is just something to learn to ignore.
• The Security Posture card stops telling you what was true when the page loaded. Every row on it
  was a snapshot taken as the page was built, which is fine on a router that has been up for a week
  and wrong on one that is still starting: open the dashboard during a boot and the card would sit
  there repeating stale answers until you reloaded it by hand. Worse, the Rule Status row could show
  a "last checked" time from before the router knew what time it was. The card now refreshes itself
  the moment the clock is set, and on a router that is already running it costs nothing at all,
  because there is nothing to wait for.
• Top talkers counts conversations, not connections. Every open admin page holds several
  connections to the router at once, so simply having the traffic page open manufactured the traffic
  that page then reported — a dozen near-identical rows, all of them your own browser, crowding out
  everything real. Flows between the same two ends are now folded into one row, and the router itself
  is left out of the list entirely, which is the rule the per-network view has always used.
• Links look like the rest of the firmware. Plain links were falling through to the browser's
  default blue, and purple once visited — on a matte-black panel, in a theme that has no blue in it.
  They now take the theme's own colour everywhere, including on the stock pages, without disturbing
  any page that had already styled its own.
• The beta badge is on every page. It was only ever on the dashboard, which is the one page you
  are least likely to be looking at when you forget you are running a beta.
• Rule Status is readable on a wide screen. The table was squeezed into a column sized for
  settings forms, with several hundred pixels of empty panel beside it, and it was breaking words
  mid-syllable to fit — "ESTABLISHED" wrapped as "ESTA BLISHED". It now uses the width it has, keeps
  its columns steady from one group to the next, and breaks text only where text can be broken.
• A firewall restore that loses a race no longer loses the table. The RT-BE88U report from v3.1.6
  had a second, deeper cause underneath the refused line. The iptables on this platform has no
  lock, so when two processes touch a table at once the kernel refuses the second one's commit — and
  the firmware forks nat-start before it loads the filter table, so a user script that touches
  iptables there (a VPN or ad-blocker helper, very common) races the boot every time. The failure
  looked identical to a bad rule, which is what made it so hard to see. A commit that fails this way
  is now simply retried, the identical file, up to five times with a widening pause, before any of
  v3.1.6's line-stripping logic is considered. The same guard covers the nat restore.
• Removing a device from Gatekeeper makes it stay removed. Removing a device that had been off
  the network for hours put it straight back under Pending approvals, and only a reboot made it
  stick. The watcher deliberately remembers a device for 24 hours after it was last seen, so the
  approved list can still show its name, band and when you first saw it — but the pending list was
  reading that memory as if it meant the device was present. It now asks whether the device is
  actually there: online in the current sweep, or seen in the last 15 minutes. A device that has gone
  stays gone; one that is genuinely still on your network will still appear, which is the entire
  point of a default-deny list.
• "Applying settings" no longer hangs on a VLAN or guest-network change. Deleting a VLAN profile,
  creating one, or editing a MAC filter could leave the dialogue sitting there with no progress bar,
  sometimes for minutes, sometimes until the browser was closed — and sometimes it behaved perfectly,
  which is what made it so hard to pin down. The randomness was the clue: those applies restart
  networking, which cuts off the reply to the very request that asked for it, and the page only ever
  started its progress bar when a reply arrived. A lost reply meant a dialogue with no way out. The
  page now notices, waits for the router to come back, and reloads itself.
• WireGuard policy routing stops sending a redirected flow out of the WAN. Two field-reported
  gaps. A connection that had already been judged kept its old verdict even after the rule behind it
  changed — retarget a rule from one client to another, disable it, or toggle the master switch, and
  existing flows carried a decision that no longer pointed anywhere, so they fell back to the plain
  internet route for as long as the connection lived. Only a decision that is still live is reused
  now; anything stale is judged again. Separately, the flow-cache bypass that a WireGuard-targeted
  rule needs could not be installed when the tunnel interface did not exist yet, which is the normal
  state at boot; starting a client now re-runs that step once the interface appears.

Images & checksums (RT-BE88U)

Two flashable images: + AI Advisor (default) and Standard (noMCP, all AI components compiled out entirely). Flash the *_nand_squashfs.pkgtb via Administration > Firmware Upgrade.

This is a beta release. Its filename carries _BETA and the router reports the same string on the dashboard and the About page, so you can always tell which channel a flashed image came from. Stable releases carry no marker.

Verify a download against the attached SHA256SUMS-RT-BE88U-Reaper_v3.1.7.txt.

Corresponding source & reproducibility

The RT-BE88U image for v3.1.7-beta is built from this repository at tag v3.1.7-beta-RT-BE88U: the pinned Asuswrt-Merlin base (3006.102.8-beta2, a7ebfa133a) plus the complete patch series. The tag freezes the exact source that produced it.

• Patches: patches/
• Provenance record: provenance/manifest.json
• How to verify: docs/REPRODUCIBILITY.md and docs/SOURCE-AVAILABILITY.md

The auto-attached Source code (zip/tar.gz) asset below is this repository at tag v3.1.7-beta-RT-BE88U (patches + docs).