EAP245 stable, running OpenWrt 21.02?

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Have some of you installed OpenWRT 21.02 on the Tp-Link EAP245v3?

Did it work well and stable afterward?
Did you get working WPA3?

Is there any other important things to know about when installing on this access point?

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2

Will it first boot with static IP address or in DHCP mode?

Answer:
The reply for this is that it works like a router at boot with static address, and if you want it to behave as the access point it’s buildt to be you need to change lan ip from static address to DHCP client with forced settings.

4

In version 21.2.0.

Another unspecified thing I don’t get at present time is that both the old swconf luci switch meny is present but the new DSA switch vlan filtering is also present?
Does both work and which one am I supposed to use? Feels like the DSA is more future proof?

Best explanation:
https://forum.openwrt.org/t/openwrt-on-eap245v3-shows-bad-file/107364/20?u=flygarn12

5

https://github.com/openwrt/luci/pull/4307#issuecomment-699573997
This is rather old now but do anyone know if the wifi-vlan connection mentioned ever was implemented and if so how does it work?
Or do I need to make a interface for every vlan as a “bridge connection” between every wifi and corresponding vlan?

6

Didn't follow it that closely, but IIRC the syntax for VLAN configuration changed with 21.02.

To come back to your original questions:

  • I've been running snapshot builds and 21.02 for months without issue (Windows, Android and iOS WiFi clients)
  • WPA3 should work just as well as on any other ath79 device with ath9k/ath10k WiFi.
  • One drawback from switching to OpenWrt, is that the 5GHz chipset isn't perfectly supported. It can't transmit with 80MHz bandwidth for example.

So it works well enough, but if you're concerned about absolute maximum performance, rather than extra features like WPA3, you could opt to stay with the original firmware (I'm not, so OpenWrt for me :slight_smile: ).

7

I found it by pure coincident while looking around in the menus yesterday. With ER4 and DSA I’m quite use to DSA now.

I have two EAP245 so one is operational with original firmware now. And the second one I am playing around with openwrt on.

From the beginning 1,5 half years ago I thought TP-Link was going to implement wpa3 sometime by firmware upgrade but they seems to not even do this on the new AP? (Apple did implement wpa3 just by iOS upgrade)

I only run 40MHz channels now, I think I tried higher from the beginning (long time ago) on original firmware without success. But I have a weather radar in the vicinity so It probably won't work anyway to go higher. It doesn’t really matter anyway since 40MHz gives 600Mbit/s and that is higher than ISP speed. (Upload speed test has actually sometimes gone up to 800Mb/s on 40MHz so that bandwith is enough😄)

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8

I got some time to look at the default install config files for the AP, and I actually think it more or less runs on DSA?
The lan interface is connected to device br-lan and that is the DSA device connected to eth0 vlan1.
I don't see any other connection to swconfig unless we use the swconfig to make a "double hop" between the connector and the vlan1 connected to the device br-lan?
The wifi are connected to lan interface.

Network:

config interface 'loopback'
	option device 'lo'
	option proto 'static'
	option ipaddr '127.0.0.1'
	option netmask '255.0.0.0'

config globals 'globals'
	option ula_prefix 'fdda:4538:b534::/48'

config device
	option name 'br-lan'
	option type 'bridge'
	list ports 'eth0.1'

config interface 'lan'
	option device 'br-lan'
	option proto 'static'
	option ipaddr '192.168.1.1'
	option netmask '255.255.255.0'
	option ip6assign '60'

config switch
	option name 'switch0'
	option reset '1'
	option enable_vlan '1'

config switch_vlan
	option device 'switch0'
	option vlan '1'
	option ports '2 5 0t'

Wifi:

config wifi-device 'radio0'
	option type 'mac80211'
	option channel '36'
	option hwmode '11a'
	option path 'pci0000:00/0000:00:00.0'
	option htmode 'VHT80'
	option disabled '1'

config wifi-iface 'default_radio0'
	option device 'radio0'
	option network 'lan'
	option mode 'ap'
	option ssid 'OpenWrt'
	option encryption 'none'

config wifi-device 'radio1'
	option type 'mac80211'
	option channel '11'
	option hwmode '11g'
	option path 'platform/ahb/18100000.wmac'
	option htmode 'HT20'
	option disabled '1'

config wifi-iface 'default_radio1'
	option device 'radio1'
	option network 'lan'
	option mode 'ap'
	option ssid 'OpenWrt'
	option encryption 'none'

The switch port map is like this:

sw.port:	0    	2       5     
Connector:	eth0    eth1	eth2
LuCi:		(CPU)	(LAN1)	(LAN2)

So to get a multi vlan setup to work with this it seems that the swconf takes care of the vlan communication between cpu and the network and from the cpu to wifi it runs DSA standard.

9

I must admit that this project didn’t go fast but WPA3 sae works for iOS 15.

Auto ch selection also works fine.

But it seems that on the 802.11ac to get more than about 54Mbit/s on download and to get “original firmware performance” the wifi country settings must be set to ‘00’. At least on the EU HW version.

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