I have a BT Home Hub 5A lying around for a while. It had OpenWrt 23.05 installed. When I whitched on it transmitted the ssid. But my client laptop was unable to join the network. So I reset the hub by pressing the reset button on back side.
Since then the hub transmits two ssids OpenWrt-5g-1cbc and OpenWrt-2g-1cbc. But apart from that there is no activity. I can connect to these ssids, but there is no ipv4 address issued.
I tried to connect a lan cable from my ( win11 ) laptop to the hub's lan1 port. But the laptop ethernet port received 169.* ip address. The hub is not assigning any ip address to its clients. I ran a dhcp server on laptop's ethernet interface. I tried with all 4 lan ports and the wan port. But none of the ports is picking up any ip address.
I ran the dhcp server on wifi interface with both the ssids. Still no luck.
Is the hub bricked? Are there any options other than serial access? I do not have soldering tools with me.
APIPA address. OpenWrt does not assign one, so you can't reach it with that.
OpenWrt does automatically assign an IPv6 link-local address though.
Try running Wireshark on your PC while connected to the LAN port, then turn on the router, and usually it sends out a few packets with its IPv6LL address that you can then reach it via. There is a guide in the wiki, but I forget where.
The wireshark showed some traffic. The router boots into a default network 192.168.1.1 but within a minute crashes into a state that offers 169.254.. address on all 3 interfaces ethernet, ssid1 (2.4 GHz) and ssid2 ( 5 GHz). I think the 'network interface' part of the firmware is corrupted. Don't know why it happened. Looks like serial connection is the only way forward.
