Modifying the official firmware

For Developers
1

Hey everyone

I was facing a problem for a long time related to region in my tplink ax23 router

The problem:- I brought it from another country so whenever i want to use my 5ghz ssid i doesn't appear because of some channel restriction in my country the channels that router supports by default doesn't support in my country so it doesn't appear in any of my devices except my laptop that i also bought from that country (uae)

So i was using openwrt for a long time(no choice) and didn't know what to do and openwrt gets speed around 300mbps on a 1gbps connection. I get around 700-800 on the official firmware and 900-1000 on direct Ethernet.

So one day i had an idea
What if i modify the official firmware and Change the region manually

So i took the firmware unpacked it with firmware mod kit and made changes in the etc/wireless folder

And repacked it

I unpacked the final firmware before flashing just to be sure the modification are there and they were there

So i flashed the firmware with openwrt and the flash was a success but

When the router booted it still had my previous configurations like ssid password gateway and everything so i tried to factory reset it

I tried resetting via button and web both didn't work

Checked the 5ghz setting to see if the region changed or not and all the channels are unlocked or not but there were still no change in the firmware it still had the 36-49 (4 channels that doesn't support) in that and no other channels were unlocked

So here i am lost and donno what to do if anyone could help please do i need to change the official firmware to support all 5ghz channels

2

Please connect to your OpenWrt device using ssh and copy the output of the following commands and post it here using the "Preformatted text </> " button:
grafik
Remember to redact passwords, MAC addresses and any public IP addresses you may have:

ubus call system board
cat /etc/config/network
cat /etc/config/wireless
cat /etc/config/dhcp
cat /etc/config/firewall

do not hide country code , thanks.

3

What is “firmware mod kit”?

The problem is probably that the configs are hardcoded in the rom image (I don’t remember the directory name) and are created after every first boot.

So if you modified the configs in /etc/configs they where rebuild as a system reset when you did the first boot after the install.

4

Vendors use various methods to set region behind the scenes - language code, time zone, even wifi location. You have open firmware to work around that. With selectable offload functions trading accuracy to gigabit speed in firewall.

5

Here is the unpacked firmware

Firmware mod kit :- https://github.com/rampageX/firmware-mod-kit

6

Firmware mod kit is a tool that lets you unpack a firmwere and make modification then auto repack it

And i modified the /etc/wireless configs

7

Do you know anything on how tplink ax23 sets their regions?

8

Modifying the OEM firmware, beyond documenting what's needed to get OpenWrt running on the device, is off-topic in this forum. Regulatory compliance also increasingly requires that the region code remains unchangeable, so you'd be walking on thin ice from the legal perspective.

3 Likes
9

This isn't supported.

But you can make a firmware via https://firmware-selector.openwrt.org and use the UCI Defaults to add custom configurations (e.g. set the radio country code, enable WiFi, set SSID, etc.).

2 Likes
10

If you stop bashing OpenWRT - just change region to your current location in LuCI. If question is about OEM firmware - ask TP-LINK, or read wifi alliance specification about composition of location sources.

3 Likes
11

This topic was automatically closed after 3 hours. New replies are no longer allowed.