I recently found a need for this old RE7000 wifi extender which has been in the closet for several years. I need to be able to create VAPs on this so wanting to install Owrt on it. I even see there is actually a recent OpenWRT build available for it.
Attempting to flash it from the GUI is failing because the factory firmware is apparently signed (no surprise really), which means to me that I must flash it using UBOOT. However, I cannot find any documentation to do this. I took the unit apart and I see four pin holes which I am assuming is the serial port, so I would need to solder on some pins first. Not a biggie.
Has anybody successfully flashed OpenWRT onto one of these devices? If so, please advise how to do it.
Hardware specification:
- SoC: MediaTek MT7621AT (880 MHz)
- Flash: 16 MB (Macronix MX25L12835FM2I-10G)
- RAM: 128 MB (Nanya NT5CC64M16GP-DI)
- WLAN 2.4 GHz: 2x2 MediaTek MT7603EN
- WLAN 5 GHz: 2x2 MediaTek MT7615N
- Ethernet: 1x 10/100/1000 Mbps
- LED: Power, Wifi, WPS
- Button: Reset, WPS
- UART: 1:VCC, 2:GND, 3:TX, 4:RX (from LAN port)
Serial console @ 57600,8n1
Flash instructions:
Connect to serial console and start up the device. As the bootloader got
locked you need to type in a password to unlock U-Boot access.
When you see the following output on the console:
relocate_code Pointer at: 87f1c000
type in the super secure password:
1234567890
Then select TFTP boot from RAM by selecting option 1 in the boot menu.
As Linksys decided to leave out a basic TFTP configuration you need to
set server- & client ip as well as the image filename the device will
search for. You need to use the initramfs openwrt image for the TFTP
boot process.
Once openwrt has booted up, upload the sysupgrade image via scp and run
sysupgrade as normal.
Well I got it flashed and booted to OpenWRT. I had to vary a little on the install instructions however. Found this Interesting: both htop and cat /proc/cpuinfo report this is a quad core CPU. Nice!
I am going to configure it with 2 WAPs and 6 VAPs. I will probably need those 4 cores.
I guess getting OpenWRT installed on this RE7000 was the easy part. I have reset this thing probably 30 times already because I cannot get ANY VLANs to work. I am a bit overwhelmed with OWRT. Having been a DD-WRT user since 2006, this is quite different and I cannot wrap my head around it.
This setup was easy on both my EA8500 and R7800, both running DD-WRT. But since this RE7000 does not have a built in Ethernet switch, I can find no logical way to make the VLANs even remotely work. I lock myself out every time (the 90 second revert only works part of the time).
What I need to do is create VLANs 1t, 10t, 11t and 12t carried over a trunk line. This single Ethernet port is connected to a managed switch configured exactly the same. Next I want to create four WAPs/VAPs and tie each one to its own VLAN. The multiple DHCP server is running on my EA8500 running DD-WRT and serving IPs for 192.168.254.x (Main), 10.1.0.x (IoT), 192.168.5.x (Guest) and 10.2.0.x (Media).
I am at a total loss. Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.
To confirm, you need 4 VLANs -- 1, 10, 11, 12 -- all tagged.
Which is the VLAN that is used for managing the AP itself? And what IP address do you want it to use?
Wow! This worked right out of the box! You really are an OpenWRT Guru for sure. Thank you so much. I think I was making it way more complicated than it needed to be. I still want to know a few things that I am unclear on.
Unmanaged Interfaces: So they do not need any IP addresses obviously. This surprised me. But since they are not running a DHCP server it does make some sense.
This method of editing the config file directly does seem to be much more efficient than using Luci. Is this the preferred method?
I was able to get one Wifi interface set up on 2.4ghz and obtain the correct subnet address, but I cannot seem to get 5ghz working at all. I'm thinking maybe a driver issue.
Appreciate your help very much! Thank you again. I will continue to work on this and will post my results as I work on this.
Your AP only needs an address on one network -- the one that is used to manage the device. The other networks are typically unmanaged because
a) the routing is handled upstream
b) you probably don't want/need an address on the other networks. Specifically, guest and IoT and other untrusted devices don't need to be able to access the AP.
In the forums, yes, this is much easier. In most situations, you can get the entire picture with just 4 config files, as compared to far more screenshots. It's also easier to track/compare everything via config files.
Otherwise, I actually use both LuCI and CLI, depending on what I'm doing. You can and should use whatever is most comfortable to you, but having familiarity with both is useful.
Possibly. I cannot comment on this, but you could open a new thread for this specific issue.
you're welcome!
If your problem is solved, please consider marking this topic as [Solved]. See How to mark a topic as [Solved] for a short how-to.
Thanks!
