I have a Linksys E8450 that has had OpenWRT 23.05 on it for several months. For the most part, it has been working just fine.
A few days ago my router stopped receiving traffic from the modem and I don't know why. I can connect directly to my modem via ethernet just fine. I can also connect directly to the Linksys router just fine via ethernet. This leads me to believe I have a hardware failure.
How can I test for hardware failure?
Try a different cord first.
Look at the lights on both ports. Are they on and blinking?
Thanks @LilRedDog I tried (again) a different cord and that didn't change. (I'm connected directly to the modem now with the cord that was connected between the devices.) Oddly there are no LED lights on the ethernet port on the router. It does blink on the modem side.
Well, that's not good. Look at the lan ports in LuCi and see if you can make one of them a wan port.
Let's undo that because all you have is Windows firewall now.
The system log will show 'wan' going up and down as the cable is plugged in or disconnected. Also in the default configuration of OpenWrt, the second light down from the top (on the front side, there are no LEDs at the ports themselves) is associated with the WAN port.
The gold-standard test for hardware failure is to flash back to stock firmware and test with that, but that is difficult on this model.
I guess that is becoming normal now.
Okay, lets try this, look in the sys log for 'wan' going up and down in the syslog as suggested by @mk24.
Then, look at the status page of LuCI and look for eth0
port status
I was able to do this. I plugged the cable from the modem into lan1 and changed the settings in luci. I also enabled the WiFi. That's progress, but now I have the following issue:
lan4) then I can get the internet (yeah!), but I can't log into LuCi (by typing in the IP address of my router) (boo!).I appreciate the help. This is a little beyond my skills at the moment.
Because you are in a switch mode.
Can you put lan4 in the wan interface?
You may have to change eth0 to unspecified in its device settings.
I was able to change the wan and wan6 interface to point to lan4. I'm not sure why 4 is any different than 1.
I don't know where to change eth0.
Snip interfaces, just the red and green boxes, I don't need to see anything else.
Go to Network Devices, edit the device named br-lan and remove the lan port that you are now using for wan from the list of ports. The other three ports will still work the same as lan, and the wan port apparently does have hardware failure.
I did this. Seems to make sense, although we still haven't solved the problem. Screenshot is attached after doing the above.
I removed lan4 following the instructions before taking the screenshot.
Look to the top right around 'refreshing' for changes waiting.
I always check that and refresh before I test anything.
Great!
Now all we need is for this hack to work.
We are going to reboot everything because the router may be a brat and want the MAC from eht0, so the easy thing is hope it forgets about it.
Power it all off, power off the modem for 3-5 minutes, power it up and let it settle in then wait another 3-5 minutes, after that power the router.
Then try wi-fi first to get to the internet.
Sorry about the inconsistent instructions, they are correct now.
I carefully and patiently did as instructed (powering off, powering on, etc.). The WiFi is still not connecting to the internet and I can't access the internet when plugged in to the router.
I'm perfectly happy resetting my router to the OpenWRT defaults and starting over. I think I can remove lan4 from the lan and make it the wan. Is that the cleanest way to move forward?
We need a working port (does not matter what it is named) in wan.
Lets see the outputs of these just in case but it won't hurt aything if you start over except if something goes wrong and you would still need to see these results:
