Netgear WAX206 Support

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
41

For info, first file of 23.05. One may want to try.
https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/23.05-SNAPSHOT/targets/mediatek/mt7622/

I would probably recommend not trying the 23.05 snapshots until there is something in the packages directory. Currently there is nothing, meaning no Luci GUI and no other packages at all for the time being. Probably best to wait until a Release Candidate release, which would have packages for that release.

Edit:
Actually, sorry, there are some packages in this directory
https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/23.05-SNAPSHOT/targets/mediatek/mt7622/packages/

But still no Luci, and many others are still missing.

I was looking in this directory, which is there but has nothing (edit: there now);
https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/23.05-SNAPSHOT/packages/

The whole 23.05 snapshot directory is actually hidden as far as I can see when looking at the releases directory (the immediate parent directory), possibly to stop people getting into problems because it is currently so incomplete.
https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/

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42

Luci is there, just try.

Yes, almost all are actually missing, because the building bots are focusing on releasing the images before the packages. Just a matter of days.

So are 21.02 and 22.03 snapshots dir.

43

Ok, looked through the packages directory and manifest files and no mention, perhaps it gets Luci from somewhere completely different?

Given that the 23.05 snapshot is hardly any different from recent master snapshots that have been running well, I hardly think there will be problems as long as the packages are there.

44

While Luci is not included in master snapshot, it is in pre-release.

It may be copied from master snapshot at this point.

Agreed. I'm running master snapshots on various devices without nothing serious occuring. It's just a matter of times (let say a couple of days) before the packages are released.

EDIT : it may be even faster, first sets of packages are beginning to be released (1h after this post).

45 
auc -n -b SNAPSHOT -B 23.05-SNAPSHOT

That should get me across

46

Won't the -n just do a dry run? Perhaps run it once with, once without?

47

The 206 is very easy to recover, no guts no glory :slight_smile:

2 Likes
48

I get an argument 22?

49

Looks like the WIFI led issue is also discussed here: ASUS RT-AX53U WiFi LEDs not working on OpenWrt 22.03.5

Checking related commits and comments, if I got this right the led handling is done by the wifi driver (mt76). Maybe there is just some config missing then, like stated here? https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/pull/11601/files#diff-09dce6818e981cc4f52d9d23e0b7326f762e85fa3281b2acd024653865fd0156

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50

I've never used the CLI version of attended sysupgrade, so can't tell you anything about code 22. I've only used the GUI version, which as of just now still only allows snapshots from the main branch that has continued separately post branching.

You could download a sysupgrade file manually from the location mentioned above and install it from either the GUI or the CLI, which both have options for keeping existing settings I believe.

But at this stage it will hardly be any different from snapshots in any case.

Edit 1: (Probably wrong)
This could be a known bug with auc.

Edit 2: (More likely)
On second thought, it is more likely to be because the firmware selector page does not have the 23.05 snapshot available, and that is where auc is looking and not finding the version you asked for.

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51

Edit:
Ignore anything you read in the earlier version of this post of mine before, I wasn't at home. I remembered my wifi lights didn't flash and couldn't think why, assuming it was not configured properly, but then I remembered I just turned them off.

Just went in and it configured WiFi LEDs no problem for me. You have to select a device below netdev, then tick which options make it trigger, then save, then save & apply.

I may be wrong but I think wifia is wl1/5GHz and wifin is wl0/2.4GHz - I set them different colours to test.

Screenshot_20230523-164047_Firefox~2
Screenshot_20230523-164047_Firefox~21362×1328 89.4 KB

Screenshot_20230523-172042_Firefox~2
Screenshot_20230523-172042_Firefox~21440×2522 205 KB

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52

Thank you! Indeed you are right, the WIFI leds work once the "netdev" trigger has been bound to a particular device/interface. This restriction to a single interface is somewhat a downside in case of multiple SSIDs. But I guess it's safe to add these LED definitions to the base configuration, for wl0-ap0 and wl1-ap0?

Other than that: The WAX206 is running rock solid for over 2 days now! :+1:

2 Likes
53

Is this different from stock firmware?

There is stricly no harm in creating LED rules :rofl:

54

Good question, I cannot tell as I took the shortest route from stock to OpenWRT when initially firing up the device and seeing the stock UI. :innocent:

Adding these configs is trivial, so there may be a reason why this hasn't been added (yet), especially since all other LEDs come enabled by default? :thinking:

55

I would care that much about this. I know devices that have no rule at all. My guess is that no one has cared to set them. That simple :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes: Considering that it's very easy to set up, each user can customize.

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56

Edit: seems that Luci is being built in to the 23.05/snapshot images now, so don't worry about the below...

All the packages seem to be up for the 23.05 snapshot, but no Luci installed, so you will have to SSH in and do;

opkg update && opkg install luci

You will then have a GUI.

I then checked the build number and was of last night it seemed to be identical to the master snapshot on the firmware selector page. I expect master snapshot numbers will diverge from 23.05 snapshot over time.

57

what's the total disk space available for openwrt softwares? thank you

58

I don't know all the technicalities but I believe there's a reasonable amount of space if you build packages into the image. If you follow my instructions on this thread regarding the image builder you should be able to manage it.

59

could you please check your luci--system--software page, what's your free space% and size?

60

Screenshot_20230529-143128_crDroid Home~2
Screenshot_20230529-143128_crDroid Home~21128×1839 226 KB

Screenshot_20230529-143646_Firefox~2
Screenshot_20230529-143646_Firefox~21440×320 8.39 KB

Here are the system overview and the software pages. But I think if you build packages in to the image it may not affect the space free like you think. I don't think the space free reflects the full space free of the router, but part of the actual space partitioned/reserved as "free space".

Edit:

The TOH page states that this device has 256MiB of flash storage and 512MiB of ram. I think that installing packages in the firmware image puts them in the read only firmware partition, leaving the ram read/write overlay partition untouched, but installing packages afterwards installs them in a ram based read/write overlay partition that is superimposed over the top of the read only firmware partition.

Clearly the amounts shown in the screen shots don't add up or correspond 100% to the flash and ram overlay partition in the hardware, backing my thinking, but I've read various things elsewhere that support my thinking, though I believe there is also a limit to how much you can put in a firmware image and that is where things get hazy for me as I am not sure what that limit is or why. I haven't done the digging to understand this fully.

Even stating that packages are installed in ram doesn't fully make sense to me, so I am likely to be completely wrong about those details, as otherwise house does a package survive a reboot? The overlay must be in the flash storage somewhere... See corrections above with thanks to @frollic.

Anyone care to provide more correct information?

Edit 2:
Here are the same screenshots after I went from a very recent master/SNAPSHOT build with Luci, Luci-app-attendedsysupgrade and luci-mod-dashboard built in to the firmware image using the firmware builder page (or perhaps it was an attended sysupgrade, but both use the same back end and both use the master/snapshot source rather than the 23.05/snapshot branch source, not that there's much difference at present) to the latest 23.05/SNAPSHOT image that has luci pre-installed, but where I had to manually install the other two packages after the fact from the software page. Manually installing the packages seems to use up more of the free space than building them in to the firmware image. (See links below, may be because the overlay file system uses JFFS which is less efficient than the squasfs that is used in the firmware image itself)

Screenshot_20230529-151228_Firefox~2
Screenshot_20230529-151228_Firefox~21415×2292 217 KB

Screenshot_20230529-151250_Firefox~2
Screenshot_20230529-151250_Firefox~21440×311 8.27 KB

Edit 3:
If you need more space for packages or other software, you can add a USB device on some routers, but obviously the Wax206 doesn't have a USB port. You can also do extroot but might face the same limitation (though see below about using extroot from a network share), but the extroot page below still has some interesting information on how the file system works...

Here are some helpful pages;

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