I have a Linksys WRT3200ACM running OpenWRT 21.02 and connected to the internet. I recently purchased a Netgear Nighthawk X4S R7800 also running OpenWRT 21.02. I would like to configure and run Batman-adv on both.
I am using the following two websites to help me with Batman-adv:
I get the following output on my r7800:
10: bat0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN qlen 1000
12: wlan0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1536 qdisc noqueue master bat0 state UP qlen 1000
and I get this output on my 3200:
12: bat0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN qlen 1000
I am trying to figure out why my r7800 lists the wlan0 line and my 3200 does not have this line.
Any suggestions on what I might look at would be appreciated.
For a while I tried to do the same with a WRT1900ACS, but seems like these units aren't very good for setting up a mesh due to the lack of driver support, at least the 1900ACS (Marvell chipset).
I've purchased TP-Link Archer C7s to function as wifi replacements to create a mesh.
I seems that what I want (a seamless WiFi network in my house) is better achieved with 802.11(k) (v) and (r) combined since my Access Points are both wired.
I will still turn off the WiFi of my WRT since it's not very reliable since OpenWrt 21.02 and use it as the brains of the network while the C7s are dumb APs.
I thought that having a batman-adv network meant that the network would be like one giant WiFi AP using Ethernet as a backhaul, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
BATMAN or other mesh is a backhaul system. It doesn't address how users interact with APs at all. If you have a wired network linking all the APs, you don't need BATMAN at all.
The term "mesh" has been generally applied to commercial products that combine automatic wireless backhaul with some sort of enhanced roaming / band steering / client forcing. These are actually two separate technologies in the same product only one of which is a mesh.