Is it appropriate to discuss the Maxwell Mesh routers here?

[wb666greene]

I've been running the Crowd Supply version of Dr. Andy Haas' Maxwell Mesh tri-band network with three tri-band nodes since it was first released. Basically happy with it, had one node suffering intermittent failures after about a year, On advice of Mr Haas I backed up my settings while it was working, and got another refurbished EA8300-RM2 and flashed it with code from the GitHub. All has been basically fine since except...

The entire network would lockup every couple of days, until I power cycled the main node of the Mesh. My adhoc solution was to have the main node reboot every night at about 4:30 AM. This also seems to have fixed the issue with the one WiFi IP camera I run (most of a test as it had never been reliable) that would require me to get on a ladder and cycle the power to get it back. This has given acceptable performance ever since, well over a year until now:

# Reboot at 4:30am every day
# Note: To avoid infinite reboot loop, wait 70 seconds
# and touch a file in /etc so clock will be set
# properly to 4:31 on reboot before cron starts.
30 4 * * * sleep 70 && touch /etc/banner && reboot

I guess this is the version info:
Powered by LuCI openwrt-19.07 branch (git-20.247.75781-0d0ab01) / OpenWrt 19.07.4 r11208-ce6496d796

I'm having issues with some devices switching from accessing with ping name to needing ping name.local

Often it spontaneously reverts to ping name working, and other times both ping name and ping name.local work

Also some systems seem to be using IP6 which is another complication for me, but I can't prove it causes any trouble other than confusion when looking things on the LuCI web page.

LuCI shows I have 189 packages installed, and 43 of them have upgrades available. Should I install the upgrades? Or try to find a upgrade from the Maxwell GitHub? But nothing on the GitHub looks newer than 3 years old.

I can't seem to find any "check for updates" selection on the Maxwell LuCI interface.

[slh]

It's only appropriate, if you were actually running OpenWrt (you aren't, as this device isn't supported by OpenWrt at all) and if you were running a supported version of OpenWrt (23.05.x, 24.10.x, contemporary development/ main snapshots - and not something half a decade out of support). Respectively if you were working on getting this device supported by OpenWrt and were documenting your development efforts.

This is not the venue to discuss random OEM firmwares, to add the more descriptive boilerplate:

It appears you are using firmware that is not from the official OpenWrt project.

When using forks/offshoots/vendor-specific builds that are "based on OpenWrt", there may be many differences compared to the official versions (hosted by OpenWrt.org). Some of these customizations may fundamentally change the way that OpenWrt works. You might need help from people with specific/specialized knowledge about the firmware you are using, so it is possible that advice you get here may not be useful.

You may find that the best options are:

1. Install an official version of OpenWrt, if your device is supported (see https://firmware-selector.openwrt.org).
2. Ask for help from the maintainer(s) or user community of the specific firmware that you are using.
3. Provide the source code for the firmware so that users on this forum can understand how your firmware works (OpenWrt forum users are volunteers, so somebody might look at the code if they have time and are interested in your issue).

If you believe that this specific issue is common to generic/official OpenWrt and/or the maintainers of your build have indicated as such, please feel free to clarify.