When I SSH into the router and run the reboot cmd, the router doesn't reboot successfully. The network goes down, and the lights on the front all turn off, and it stays that way till a hard power cycle. Any clues or advice on how to fix this or what logs to look at to get more insight (perhaps some process is stuck)?
Thanks
Have you installed any non-default packages, created any services/daemons, or setup cron jobs or other scripts that run persistently?
I followed the DNS Hijacking guide. I also installed some wireguard packages to run a wireguard server on the router. I just got as far as installing the wireguard tools and associated luci package, and haven't actually configured wireguard yet.
None of these things should affect the reboot. But you could try backing up your config and resetting to defaults to see if that solves the issue.
I read that logs are stored in RAM to avoid flash wear. Maybe I can setup a syslog server and direct openwrt to use that? But if the problem is occurring after the network interface goes down, that may not work either. It's got a USB port on the back, can it log to that?
Ok, will try that first. Thanks.
Yes, that's possible:
It's located on the web GUI under System > Logging; and as noted below, you can also save to a USB stick.
Yes, that statement is true.
Your 8450 has a USB port... you could save logs to a USB flash memory stick. This will have the same long-term problem of flash wear, but it's easily replaceable, cheap, and ubiquitous.
But a syslog server would also work; the only problem here is that you will only be able to see what happens up to the point the ports are taken down... anything beyond that causing a hang will not come through
And the other option would be to open the device and connect via serial UART.