Hello,
I'm extremely new to OpenWRT, but I have a pretty good experience with Linux systems overall.
I have an old (early 2010s) PC which I'm using for experiments on Linux distros.
Recently, I've been trying to install OpenWRT on it and create a router and tunnel all my connections via my VPN (for government censorship and filtering circumvention).
As my first step, I'm trying to run it simply as a router. I had installed the OS successfully on my PC, but the OS does not detect any of my ethernet devices (this PC has two of them).
dmesg command did not show any errors.
Some links suggested that I should run lspci but it's not installed by default and I have no way to install it.
I have a router with internet connection and another access point to connect my other devices and I'm trying to put my OpenWRT (x86) router in between them. But OpenWRT does not detect any of those connections. I have no idea what might cause this problem and I'll really appreciate it if anyone could help me on this matter.
What chipset are the Ethernet controllers?
Could be as simple as downloading the needed kmods on another machine and copying them over, or build them into an image using imagebuilder
The x86_64 images have the kernel modules for the most common ethernet cards pre-installed, but anything more exotic might need installing (imagebuilder/ online-imagebuilder can help with that, once you know what's to be added) - or packaging (from the mainline kernel), in case of more rare stuff.
In contrast to OpenWrt, a typical general purpose linux distribution has a lot more (~everything imaginable) preinstalled, making this easier to debug - so run a live linux USB stick of your favourite distribution and run lspci -knn there, to find out what you need. While there are other approaches to debug this from plain-OpenWrt, without any detours to other linux distributions, this tends to be the quickest and easiest.
Keep in mind that a system of ~2010 vintage will likely have an idle power draft of around 75+ watts (which might be fine for a client, used sparely, but is less impressive for 24/7 usage of a router), while more modern (>= haswell or >= baytrail-d) might get away with 5-15 watts, which can quickly pay for itself within short time (less than a year, even if you buy a new device). So reconsider if running this device makes sense, economically and ecologically. Tips for getting cheap used x86-based firewall with full Gbit NAT (a PC Engines APU) if you are in the US (especially in the later parts of it) has a few examples which often sell for under 50 EUR/ USD (used), but get away with less than 15 watts.
Hello, thanks for your reply.
You were right, the problem was that the driver for these specific Ethernet ports were not installed by default on OpenWRT. So I did a little search and used lspci on my live USB and found out that I need to install kmod-sky2 and it worked.
I'm leaving this reply and this link here for anyone in the future who may have a similar problem.
I followed instructions from this post to find the kmod package that I needed: Ethernet ports not functioning x86 - #8 by NC1
Also, I appreciate your concerns about power usage and I carefully read your comments about getting a newer device. I'm just experimenting with OpenWRT and checking if it is a viable solution for my problem; so using my old PC as a router is a temporary measure, I'm intending to purchase a new device (perhaps a modem+router) in the future.
Thanks again for your time, it helped a lot.
It was as simple as that 
Thanks for your reply I searched my chipset number on linux-hardware.org and on Google and downloaded the appropriate kmod for it.
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