I do not care about ever running Belkin factory firmware. It will always run openwrt. So I should go for UBI version. I want to make sure I understand this right.
If needed, downgrade factory firmware to belkin version 1.00
Sorry for the confusion result of multiple contributors trying to improve the README file in the repository (which I'm very thankful for). It's maybe overly complete by now and hence it's good that Craig made that simple guide.
And yes, that's really it
I prefer an integrated device like this too, for an flat or installation where you have to put the router on a desk.
I don't like having many devices with many plugs and everything hanging from each other.
And the devices is really quite good for the price (a pity my WIFI channels are so clogged and the performance is not stellar, but better than before).
It can be different if you have it in a rack in the garage or laundry room.
May be in my new home I will put a RPi, nano Pi r4S or other device with x86 and a managed router and no wifi there, with AP distributed in the house.
I have to plan that carefully. But may be I still use a router of these as an AP in some place where it has to sit on a desk.
A pity it only is designed to be in vertical and a pity the lack of 6 GHz WIFI.
Next release will have it for sure.
Your other 2 routers are configuerd just as AP?
May be a good thing to have it "cloned" just in case the router fails you can recover quickly from a config backup.
Yeah I have one as main router that handles VPN plus SQM (using veth-lan) and two further devices wirelessly connected via WDS with 802.11r enabled. Gives huge coverage throughout three floors and garden of big house.
I cannot activate 802.11r as some devices don't work with it (my kids did not spoke to me for a whole weekend for letting them with no connection XD ).
What kind of WiFi speeds and coverage are people seeing with this device running OpenWRT? I was honestly pretty disappointed with the wireless performance with the stock firmware - 5 GHz range in particular seemed poor even compared to the ZyXEL all-in-one furnished by my ISP.
5ghz does seem to be a little weak, although not too bad, I have one device that connected to 5ghz no problem with my old wrt1200 that won't connect to 5ghz with the e8450, but it also happens to be the one farthest away, all others connect to 5ghz fine, speeds have been great though.
I have bought the Linksys E8450 and I will flash to OpenWrt using non-UBI method this week.
In case I want to switch back to vendor firmware, what should I do?
Update
I found that the settings will be gone when I reboot the router...
Is it possible to solve it? or I have to go with RBI method?
I reverted my RT3200 back to non-ubi a few weeks back and have been running openwrt non-ubi since. I am not sure what you mean by settings not being saved. Could you be more specific on this? If you try to flash the sysupgrade non-ubi image to the stock firmware the unit will reboot back into stock. Is this what you mean? Daniel has mentioned to use the kernel non-ubi image as the initial flash. From experience once the unit reboots into openwrt, you will then need to upload via scp the sysupgrade non-ubi image and then ssh to the router and then flash that image using sysupgrade. However I don't know if this works on virgin units though. If it does you should be good to go. Please note that snapshot images do not include the luci web interface so any configuration as well as installing of luci will need to be done from ssh. This router in non-ubi or stock configuration has two partitions both contain copies of the stock firmware. This is a safety measure that if one partition ever becomes corrupted or you upgrade to a newer firmware there will be one copy of stock to boot. So when I flashed openwrt non-ubi the other stock partition seems to remain unaffected so if I ever need to revert I just trigger the router to boot the stock partition and then flash another stock firmware to overwrite the openwrt non-ubi partition. Please also note that ubi overwrites everything including bootloader and stock partitions if I understand it correctly making it not possible to revert to stock unless you backed up the stock layout before conversion. The ubi installer wiki has backup instructions in the steps. I did the full mtd backup which made reverting much easier. If you never plan on going back to stock then you can ignore this step. Hopefully this helps.
The "recovery" and "installer" builds are RAM based. They don't save settings changes to flash. They're intended to boot once as a transitional step to install the final image.
SSH to 192.168.1.1, and run the follow command cd /tmp wget https://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/targets/mediatek/mt7622/openwrt-mediatek-mt7622-linksys_e8450-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin sysupgrade -v openwrt-mediatek-mt7622-linksys_e8450-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin
In my case, I edit the lan IP to 192.168.1.5 and set the Wi-Fi SSID/Passphrase.
After reboot, the E8450 lan IP changed back to 192.168.1.1.
Also, the Luci show
/usr/lib/lua/luci/dispatcher.lua:427: /etc/config/luci seems to be corrupt, unable to find section 'main'
It seems that I have to reset the Router...
I have to run from downloading sysupgrade.bin to opkg install command to solve the problem. The procedure is like a reset.
For the problem of switching back to stock firmware, I have to wait for developer explanation. The information I find is for RBI method. The information I find is for UBI method.
When you say 'RBI', do you mean 'UBI' since there is nothing called RBI that I can find? I still am not sure what you are meaning by the word 'settings'? Settings usually means configuration which is stuff you specify when you configure the router firmware such as static ip, wireless network name and password, etc and this stuff is stored somewhere on the firmware partition and is loaded whenever the router reboots. Not sure how to help your further on this.
As for the kernel image file, it is called openwrt-mediatek-mt7622-linksys_e8450-initramfs-kernel.bin. The sysupgrade image is called openwrt-mediatek-mt7622-linksys_e8450-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin. I downloaded both of the files from firmware selector (note: both of these are the non-ubi snapshot versions). This is presuming you tend to stay non-ubi all the way, of course.
If you decide the ubi method, there should be a link to download the image files (I think the current version is 0.6.1). These have already been built for you and already include the luci web interface. However, do remember that ubi is a one way street so if you ever plan to revert the unit back to stock, I strongly recommend following the 'full mtd backup' steps provided on the wiki. Download these files to your pc and keep them in a safe location and you can use them to revert.
Going the non-ubi method is a little bit more advanced as since it is a snapshot image, it doesn't come with luci so you will need to use ssh to configure everything such as connecting the router to the internet and installing luci. From there, you can add the attended-sysupgrade-luci app to update to a newer image.
Hmm. If you are selecting 'save' it should be storing the settings. You also need to 'apply' the settings after saving them to be sure openwrt retains them.
