Hello marok,
have you changed the 5GHz channel?
With channel 44 my C7 seems to be very stabile.
Uwe
Hi marok, thanks for adding your experience.
I'm trying to follow what exactly you did. Is this right: You were on a previous version of OpenWRT, then you upgraded to 19.07.3 and had a lot of problems, then you did a fresh install of 19.07.3 and reconfigured all your settings and it has been stable?
So when you did your initial upgrade to 19.07.3, did you take the option to preserve settings? I have been having 2.4 GHz cut out within a few days, and I always upgrade by not preserving settings.
Thanks!
@uweklatt. I run mine on 36: 80mhz, due to being near an airport and DFS. 52 still worked fine just not ideal. Canadian band regulations
@smeep Correct. Though I tried a few things:
- One device I tried 18->19 keeping settings. Not stable
- Another device 19 (one of the earlier releases) direct. Not stable.
- Tried 19.07.3 fresh followed by backup from 18.x. Not stable. Then updating to trunk
- Variations of the ath10k drivers
- Keeping devices unlinked from each other. No difference.
For all I found the 5ghz radio would even fail to start unless i did a restart on the radio from luci after it booted.
So this time around. Fresh install of 19.07.3 first thing i did is change the ath10k packages. Update the rest of the packages. Then configure. So far so good for a week? Perhaps it was the order of operations before I configured it.
opkg update
opkg remove ath10k-firmware-qca988x-ct kmod-ath10k-ct; opkg install kmod-ath10k-ct-smallbuffers ath10k-firmware-qca988x-ct-htt
opkg list-upgradable | cut -f 1 -d ' ' | xargs opkg upgrade
Differences I spot in the two configuration backups are minor. LED settings in system, default firewall rules have more icmp types. One of my additional zones is created with a default bridge associated with to it. The port syntax for the vlans in network are slightly different.
For what its worth, I found out that 80MHz on 5GHz is buggy and if you don't need 866Mbps+ speed then switch to 40MHz and setting channel to 44 is working great for me. I also have 0 problems on 2GHz channel set to 1 at 20MHz. Both radio power levels are maxed out.
I'm on snapshot build with default kmod and QCA packages (-ct pre-installed) on Archer C7 v5.
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It's a good point, I don't need to use the 5 GHz because my connection is a 50 mbit VDSL. With that connection speed, all you need is a 20 MHz channel. I have used 20 MHz on 5 GHz before when I noticed that a PC that I had temporarily in a new location wasn't doing as well on 2.4 GHz for some reason--normally it is on a LAN cable.
I'm preferring to use 5Ghz because syncing from pc to phone goes with naerly 30 mbyte/sec and my nas transfers around 20 mbyte/sec. over wifi. It does not fit for my Google home and alexa devices, they only respond reliably and play multi speaker correctly when on 2.4 ghz.
Why are people still believeing that fiddling with ath10 5GHz drivers will magically fix their ath9 2.4GHz issues? Two separate pieces of hardware. This is some sort of forum truth that has been going around.
You can easily test it, just remove all ath10k drivers (not disable it, remove it all together) and just use ath9...hck, you can even build a "dumb AP" configuration and remove ath10 and it is still bad. It works until it does not. Good way to truly test 2.4GHz is to have wired iperf3 server (a PC) and then have two mobile devices connected to 2.4 running iperf3 clients at the same time. If it does not fold then it is truly fixed.
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It's a good point. I believe the argument was that one of the drivers was sucking up memory to the point that it affected the other driver.
Anecdotally, I had a work video conference freeze on me today, and GoToMeeting said that my bandwidth was too low to support video. I ran a speed test and it showed very slow upload speed. This is over the 5 GHz radio. I restarted the 2.4 GHz radio, and then my 5 GHz speed went back to normal. I can't really explain it.
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But it is not really the case. 2.4GHz will fold at high load despite router having plenty of RAM left. It will fold even with 5GHz drivers not loaded at all.
Update on my side. One of my routers is now damaged. Began with both radios failing to work. Then even failsafe doesn't start. Booted a few times over a 100 power cycles or so but it's likely toast. I did try to reflash during one of those working cycles but no luck.
No date on the device itself, but sometime late 2014. 2.0 revisions. They had a fantastic run and were quite stable. Up until I put 19.07 on it. Quite stable in AP, less so in STA mode (which is the one that died).
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Hi
using the wdr3600 gives same problems, both on ar71xx and ath79 at least on 19.0 version.
Posting this since, the wdr3600 seems being used by far less persons.
Could this be then a mysterious bug on the firmware?
Does anybody know if this bug is reported on bugs.openwrt.org?
Is it possible to manually replace the Ath10k drivers with ones from OpenWrt 18.x? I'm assuming no, but not sure how to determine this. Would mesh be supported?
Could be a failing power supply?
This was an issue for me at one point for a cable modem.
@Catfriend1 Would you mind sharing some details of your current tweaks to achieve stability?
I have configured the following. Still get occassional drop-outs and iPhones requiring wifi off/on cycling on 2.4GHz.
Router Archer C7 v2
-19.07.5, replaced ct drivers with non ct drivers
-5GHz SSID WPA2 on channel 36 with 80MHz width
-mesh with WPA3 on 5Ghz, replaced wpad-basic with wpad-mesh-openssl
-2.4GHz SSID x 3 WPA2 on channel 1 with 20MHz width
-Network|Firewall|Software Flow Offloading checked
-SQM, configured to cake and piece_of_cake.qos
-Ad Block
-WireGuard VPN
-DDNS
-IPV6 disabled
-no cron nightly reboot yet
-no watchdog script yet
Mesh Node Archer C7 v2
-19.07.4, replaced ct drivers with non ct drivers
-mesh with WPA3 on 5Ghz, replaced wpad-basic with wpad-mesh-openssl
-2.4GHz SSID x 1 WPA2 on channel 1 with 20MHz width
-miniDLNA
-samba exFAT usb3 l
-IPV6 disabled
-no cron nightly reboot yet
-no watchdog script yet
I am hoping that I can buy more Archer C7s and quickly add more mesh nodes by simply restoring the config. However, the wifi instability is stopping me from building out just yet.
Also, I have always been wondering if I should put the mesh backhaul on 2.4GHz?
Thanks!
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@Catfriend1 I just found your post State of Archer C7 v2 in mid-2020 with some details and your posts afterwards with your EU and US custom builds. So great. Thanks for sharing those. Looks like your setup is similar to what I aspire to. Do you think I can use the US build for CA Canadian devices, or will I need to build my own config? Roughly how long does compiling a build take?
Mesh question: Does batman-adv mesh work better than configuring mesh with just 802.11s? I didn't use batman-adv when I configured my mesh, as I thought it was actually an old protocol or something. After some reading, I now understand it is a routing overlay that goes over top of 802.11s, but I don't quite understand it's significance or whether it's needed in my use case, which is several nodes around a house with one node that does dhcp and connects to an external ISP.
Thanks!
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