Ad-hoc OSLR link between 2 EA8500 (19.07.8) dies less than .5 hour

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Hello all! I am experimenting with a OLSR setup at home. Here is what my setup looks like:

Main wireless router - - - (wireless client) - - - EA8500 - - - (olsr) - - - EA8500 - - - (wifi) - - - Laptop

So my first Linksys EA8500 connects wirelessly on 5G ratio to my main wireless router (172.23.233.253/24) as a wireless client, it gets a DHCP address 172.23.233.121 from the main router. It is configured with it's own fixed IP address 172.17.18.19 /24 for the LAN interface (DHCP Server enabled). It's 2.4GHz interface is used for OLSR with ad-hoc mode, it has a fixed IP address of 10.10.10.19/24 there, no DHCP server.

The second Linksys EA8500 router wirelessly connects to the first EA8500 with an ad-hoc OLSR link, it uses 2.4Ghz interface for that, with IP 10.10.10.20/24 fixed address. On it's 5Ghz ratio, it serves as an access point for my laptop. So here LAN (eth0.1) and 5GHz ratio (wlan1) are bridged together, with IP of 172.18.19.20/24 DHCP enabled.

For the OLSR setup, I followed this article here, It's written for Openwrt 15.05, but it plays well with 19.07.8.

If you follow the article step by step, you will see the link between 2 nodes. However, devices connected to the first or second EA8500 can't access the internet, so I have to add a firewall NAT route on 2nd EA8500 like this: for source IP address of 172.18.19.0/24 (any port any outbound zone) to destination IP address of !172.18.19.20/24, do MASQUERADE. On 1st EA8500, I added a similar firewall NAT rule: for source IP address of 10.10.10.1/24 (any port any outbound zone) to destination IP address of !10.10.10.2/24, do MASQUERADE.

With this setup, when I connect to the 2nd EA8500 wirelessly from my laptop, I can access both EA8500's GUIs and the internet, but the OLSR connection always dies (at least I can't access 1st EA8500's GUI or internet) after about 5 to 10 minutes.

I spent days searching everywhere, but failed find any useful information on where the problem could be. Can you expert here please point me the right direction? Thanks a million in advance!!!

I can attach screen captures and logs if needed.

2

Here is how the 2nd EA8500 Firewall custom NAT rule looks like:

20_nat
20_nat1366×728 62.1 KB

I am not sure what I should put as "Outbound zone", but I think the rule works for my purpose.

This is for the 1st EA8500, it works, but I am guessing it's the one kills the OLSR connection:

19_nat
19_nat1366×728 60.5 KB

Any thoughts? Thanks.

3

Did you make a route to the Internet on the OLSR table?

4

I am sorry, can you explain more on what you meant by OLSR table? According to the article I was following, the only I need to do for the whole setup to access Internet is, on the 1st EA8500 (which connects to my main router via wifi on 5Ghz radio) is this:

  • Go to Services | OLSR IPv4 .
  • Select HNA Announcements tab.
  • Click Add .
  • Enter:
  • Network address : 0.0.0.0
  • Netmask : 0.0.0.0
    In Network | Firewall | General Settings change Forward as accept
  • Find Zones at the bottom of the page.
  • Click on Edit for lan .
  • Tick on Masquerading .
  • Tick on MSS clamping .
  • Find the Inter-Zone Forwarding at the bottom of the page.
  • Tick on all Allow forward to destination entries.

Thanks.

5

By the way, I think I might have solved it. The link has stayed on for 2.5 hours now. Fingers crossed.

I will post an update here if the OLSR link survives for more than 48 hours.

6

Unfortunately, the problem still exists :frowning:

There are tons of these messages in the log when the link dies:

Tue Nov  9 21:03:49 2021 kern.warn kernel: [51099.168630] ath10k_pci 0000:01:00.0: SWBA overrun on vdev 0, skipped old beacon
Tue Nov  9 21:03:49 2021 kern.warn kernel: [51099.176008] ath10k_pci 0000:01:00.0: SWBA overrun on vdev 0, skipped old beacon
Tue Nov  9 21:03:49 2021 kern.warn kernel: [51099.183287] ath10k_pci 0000:01:00.0: SWBA overrun on vdev 0, skipped old beacon
... ...

After a quick search here, it looks like a known problem.

7

I have made tons of changes during the past few days, I think now it's working reliably enough for daily use. I used the OLSR link to stream Youtube for 3 hours last night, and then went to bed. This morning the link is still up.

Sadly, the solution finally eliminate the problem is to let the 2.4GHz WiFi interface operate at "Legacy" mode, which lower the speed to 54Mb/s.

So if you are planning to use EA8500 for OLSR, keep that in mind.

8

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