I have a main wifi network and a guest wifi network. Everything was working fine for several months. Today, the internet connectivity for the guest wifi network is down. On the main wifi network, everything still works perfectly.
What I've tried so far:
Rebooted the router.
Rebooted the cable modem.
Examined the logs with logread
Nothing in the logs stands out to me and I'm not sure where to go next in the troubleshooting process. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.
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:
Remember to redact passwords, MAC addresses and any public IP addresses you may have:
I believe your problem is that you have the guest network attached to two radios. For that to work, you need a bridge. Add a bridge and then modify your guest network to use that bridge.
config device
option name 'br-guest'
option type 'bridge'
option bridge_empty '1'
config interface 'guest'
option device 'br-guest'
option proto 'static'
option ipaddr '192.168.10.1'
option netmask '255.255.255.0'
Then reboot your rotuer and test again.
Also, unrelated to your issue -- you should upgrade to the latest OpenWrt. At least 22.03.6, but preferably 23.05.2.
I added your suggested modifications to /etc/config/network and that fixed my issue, thank you so much!
And I will add "Upgrade OpenWRT to my TODO list", thanks for pointing that out.
For my own understanding, I'd like to learn more about why it wasn't working, and why your suggested modification fixed it. Are there any particular sections of the documentation that you could recommend that are relevant?
What's mysterious is why it was working with my previous configuration for several months before deciding to stop working out of nowhere, but I doubt I'll ever find an answer to that.
Each network interface has one logical port and can attach to exactly one 'device' -- a device, in this case, is Ethernet (a physical port or VLAN), a wifi radio, or a bridge.
A bridge is in essence a software equivalent to an unmanaged switch. A bridge makes a single connection to the network interface and then allows one or more other physical devices to be attached. So if you want to use more than one wifi radio or wifi + ethernet (and in some cases, multiple Ethernet ports), you need to use a bridge. (simplisticly, you can think of it as a splitter.)
I don't know why it worked for you in the past and what caused it to stop working, but one possible situation is that only one radio had actually been connected, and maybe a device reboot or other event caused both radios to try to connect, thus resulting in the problem you experienced. The bridge fixes that because it allows multiple devices to connect to the network interface.
