You are right. I traced the issue to DNS.
I am having issues with stubby for cloudflare DoT
When I disable stubby opkg update works fine.
But now the issue is why is stubby causing issues. Here are my settings (which work fine with my RPi3 OpenWrt router - instructions here):
Per those instructions, there's only 2 steps after installing stubby:
Ok, found the issue, unfortunately I have never used stubby (I'm using Unbound as recursive DNS) but, since your R4S doesn't have any DNS, this could be the trouble? The clients connected to it are working because of Stubby is working but you have to write some DNS to the LAN interface of you R4S. Give a try, restart the interface (or reboot) and see if you can ping an address from it (obviously ping coudflare.com, not 1.1.1.1 
)
Ok I have zoomed in further to the issue. After I read this guide, I see he did not have "0::1#5453 " under 'DNS forwardings'
And that is some ipV6 thing. So I just remove only that and keep the other 127.0.0... and it works fine.
I will go to the stubby thread to resolve this issue, since it doesn't appear to be a R4S issue
Well depends on what you mean for “normal”
Anyway yes this is the default OpenWrt firewall behavior.
Thanks again !
So when I did the sysupgrade, I noticed I had to do microSD card partition resizing again.
Is this normal after every sysupgrade release?
ext4
Yes if you’re using a generic build or the online builder (100MB). If you compile it yourself you can specify the size.
But anyway I would leave the root as it is and make another partition, or (better) use an external drive.
the hole is a camera mount screw. not sure why they included it but does make wallmounting easier to a point?
Works fine for Intel... Prerelease hardware support is submitted to mainline Linux on a regular basis, so almost always winds up merged and released by launch.
Completely different situation in my opinion tbh.
Cause intel is a big company which holds a monopoly with AMD while friendlyelec is small company disputing a market with many others.
Also intel creates their own hardware from scratch and they depend a 100% on third party OS support, in other words, they have no choice!
While friendlyelec pieces together other companies hardware to create a device to sell, which they can provide with their own custom OS based on linux which will have already support for the hardware itself since(again) they are using other companies hardware(CPU, Ethernet NIC's and etc) and those companies or other people already added support for them in linux.
Thanks can you expand how to do this?
Is that using a USB stick with R4S ?
I guess the extra storage is only for additional packages you install?
The default root partition size (100mb) should be enough , for example if no one ever installed any packages?
Extra storage is for what you want, I'm using it to collect collectd data, to avoid useless wear of the microSD.
100mb is enough, I'm using less than 15% of it but as always depends on your usage, opkg packets are "scripts with other scripts", they weight few kb...
Follow the official tutorial to use an external drive: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/storage/usb-drives
I have no idea but I would never mount it from “the rear”, instead from the bottom.
Anyway the point is that my unit doesn’t have it:
No, you have it because you have installed Docker or a build with Docker.
You must be redirecting elsewhere so it is not lost on reboot? OpenWrt collectd documentation states data are written in /tmp/rrd by default, which is a RAM-based directory. At least I hope so - if luci statistics is writing to the flash on my EA8500's, I'm uninstalling it.
Yes exactly, well to be correct I'm already redirecting/writing it to my Grafana/Prometheus server to build the stats and graphs, see post above: NanoPi R4S rk3399 R6S RK3588S 4G is a great new OpenWrt device - #1073 by giuliomagnifico but if I save to a drive, I can have it also on reboot, and the drive acts also as backup.
And (more importan) I'm also writing to the drive the stats of Netlink Bandwidth Monitor, (nblwblnwlb...mon damn that name is terrible I can't write it 
)
cat /etc/config/nlbwmon
config nlbwmon
....
option database_directory '/mnt/sda1/nlbwmon'
So I can browse the stats by month and not "by every reboot".
When I go to the wiki page you linked, both the "install" and the "upgrade" have the same link:
/openwrt-rockchip-armv8-friendlyarm_nanopi-r4s-ext4-sysupgrade.img.gz
But this is actually the "install" ?
Yes, because as I said there's no "factoru to OpenWrt special image", you have to write to the sd a new image.
Anyway when I said
‘what you want’ (I suggest to use the squashFS)
I meant the rc6 or the snapshot. Here is the latastest squashFS snapshot, if you want another branch, just browse the repository.
Thanks so you are writing a new SD image using what you just linked?
Because that is also a sysupgrade image, in the filename
I guess I am confused what image are you burning to microSD card, to start.
I understand there is no factory image but what image are you using to start with (before upgrading)?
