I wanted to test out the new RC1 on a spare Archer C7 so I installed it, replacing a fresh install of 22.03.5. It came up nicely and I started playing around in LuCI, setting up a couple of VLANs and wifi SSIDs. I noticed that some new devices appeared that I've never seen before:
phy0-ap0
phy0-ap1
What are these?
I wasn't quite able to get the VLAN setup working as I expected to -- I had one VLAN attached (I thought) to the fourth LAN ethernet port, but I couldn't get an IP on it when I connected to it. Anyway, I decided to roll it back to 22.03.5; when I did that through the LuCI interface I got all sorts of warnings, but I assumed a fresh install without trying to preserve any settings at all would do no harm, so that's what I did. The router never came back up. When I start it, I get a couple of flashes from the power LED but then nothing.
It's not a big disaster; this is one of a few spare routers I have around for testing and learning with. But I would like to get it back if I can, and also to understand what might have happened so I don't make the same mistake again. I have used the TFTP route before, so I'll be trying that. But I'd like to know what I did wrong; is it never going to be possible to install an earlier version once you've installed 23.0.5.x, or did I miss something crucial?
OpenWRT switched to new naming for wifi interfaces
phy0 is first radio
phy1 is second, etc
phy0-ap0 is firstAP on first radio
phy0-ap1 is second AP on first radio (suppose GUEST ssid)
should already recover your issue (simple misconfiguration), tftp is a bigger hammer (but should 'always' work).
Going back to older versions is (almost) always possible, just don't retain you configuration in that case (the old version might not know about the newer syntax changes, as in your WLAN confusion right now).
That's what I figured, and I specifically chose not to retain any configuration, but it still got borked. I've tried all the normal reset/failsafe options, but no joy, so I think I'll have to use TFTP.
I've seen one of these C7s get into a state where only TFTP would recover it before, but in that case I was getting more blinking LEDs and stuff; this one just flashes power and the far right LED a couple of times, then goes dead.
Update on this: I've recovered the router using TFTP, and I have a source for another cheap spare of exactly the same model, so I'm going to be trying all this again to see if I can reproduce the weird VLAN problems I was having with the RC.
Incidentally, this router recovery TFTP turned out to be on 192.168.0.x, as the OpenWrt router page suggests; my previous experience with a v2 was that it used 192.168.1.x.