Multiple "Known Networks" with a WAN wireless client

Installing and Using OpenWrt Network and Wireless Configuration
1

Hi All,

I'm in the process of configuring an Rpi4 with OpenWRT for use in a caravan, the main goal being to connect to the site's wifi and fall back to 4g if the wifi is congested/busy

I've got WAN failover working flawlessly but i need to be able to remember more than one SSID on the WAN Wifi Client,

In the past i've just been able to modify wpa_supplicant with multiple configured SSID's, but i don't know how to the equivalent in OpenWrt

Anybody have any ideas?

Thanks

2

Create multiple uplink wans ?
Or modify the existing one, over and over again ?

3

I did consider this, but i'd just like something a little cleaner

4

There's the travelmate package, haven't used it myself though.

1 Like
5

I've given it a try, and as much as it looks like it would do what i want it to do, it just doesn't seem to work, i'll have another go at it at some point

6

Travelmate is the solution I think you want... what wasn't working when you tried it? I don't use it frequently, but it has worked for me whenever I've needed it -- you just have to follow the directions for the setup process and it should be good.

If it's not working (or if there is a feature mismatch), consider raising that issue in the support thread for the package:

7

I think i need to take my config back to base and get that element working first,

I'm liking the configurability of OpenWrt, but i'm also climbing a fairly steep learning curve with it so my config is probably a bit messy at the moment

The main issue i had was that when an SSID "went away" it wouldn't try any of the others and just kept trying the one it was previously connected to, even when the SSID was available, it connected but the interface was still marked as "Down" in MultiWan Manager

I'm going to get to know it a little more before i try again because it's worth the effort for the features it will give me

8

So I think you may have overlapping issues.

  1. Travelmate is really setup to handle the situation where a known/previously used SSID is not necessarily in-range... it will progress down the list of preferred SSIDs and it will gracefully fail if it doesn't find one available. This is critical for devices that have a single radio device that is to be used in both STA and AP mode, but it is useful for devices with multiple radios, too. I don't know offhand if it has connectivity detection (i.e. beyond the physical/wifi connection, can it detect if an active internet connection is possible?)... that may be in the documentation or support thread.

  2. the multi-wan manager may be having trouble re-establishing the wifi connectivity once connected. This would likely be an issue of the priority and failover configurations, but I don't use mwan so I'm personally not going to be of much help.

9

I think i might have found the root of the issue, i just don't know how to fix it

Travelmate is now working exactly as it should, but mwan3 doesn't seem to be able to detect the metric of the interface and as a result doesn't bring it up

The interface metric for the travelmate interface is definitely set, i just don't know where to go from here

10

might want to create a separate thread for this issue ...

11

I've now solved the issue

When creating the travelmate interface, the interface is created in lower case (regardless of what you type)

the policy was using the name based on uppercase letters

Real rooking mistake, quite embarrassed to be fair haha

Huge thanks all who helped

1 Like
12

Glad it is working!

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! :slight_smile: