I think I bricked my R7900

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

So, I think the first thing I did with my LEDE installation was brick my device.

  1. The setup
    Flashing the device went fine, and I was able to get into Luci to setup things, but not able to connect to the internet. Then I set the service type to dhcp instead of static, figuring it would then get an IP assigned from the router upstream of it.
    Only, now it isn't on 192.168.0.1 and I can't find any ips with an open port 80 or 22.

  2. The attempts:
    I tried a hardware reset, but never got a flashing power light.

I then setup wireshark and notice that it is sourcing a lot of stuff from 0.0.0.0 on the eth2 connection.
Also, it never broadcast the 'push button to reset' message during startup

I can get into the upstream router and see that the LEDE device is getting an ip, but I think LEDE firewalls out connections from the WAN side.

While connected to LEDE device, I ran a port scan to find any IP with an open 80 or 22, but didn't find any.

I tried the TFTP fix, but couldn't find an IP address for the LEDE device while connected to the LAN, and the WAN is firewalled off.

  1. Any suggestions?
2

The mistake is naturally setting the routers lan prtocol to dhcp. It should have been static. And then wan is upstream dhcp...

Some ideas:

Openwrt LEDE failsafe mode. That should revert network to default 192.168.1.1. failsafe is tricky to get into as it requires button push inside a two second window during boot. Best can be to push some button rapidly until the LED starts really rapid blinking.

Other fancy idea might be trying to setup a dhcp server in lan. As router seeks now dhcp address, just provide one. E.g. run a dhcp server in your PC. Then the router might get a valid address and you could login into that.

1 Like
3

I tried the failsafe boot idea, but somehow that didn't seem to work.
I'll look into setting up dhcp on my workstation.

Thank you for your guidance.

4

The solution!

From the upstream router, connect both to both the LAN and the WAN port with two cables. Use the LAN port IP to get to Luci.
#headdesk

5

Great that the "provide DHCP server for LAN" idea worked.