option channel 'auto'
option channels '52 36 132 149'
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I'm running 21.02.0 on three routers: One Linksys ea8500 and two ea8300 "satellites". The ea8300s use one of their 5GHz radios for backhaul via WDS to the ea8500 and their other 5GHz radio to service clients. (The ea8500 also services ordinary clients on its single 5GHz radio).
Since upgrading to 21.02.0 a few weeks ago I've had an issue that packets randomly stop flowing from the satellites and their connected clients to the ea8500. This happens to both satellites about once every couple days.
After some troubleshooting I found that restarting br-lan on the satellites resolves the issue and gets packets flowing again until the next failure (Forcing reconnection of the WDS client, either by restarting the radio on the satellites or de-authenticating them from the WDS-AP, also resolves the issue). I set up a job on each of them to reboot every morning but this doesn't seem to help hold-off the problem because as often as not packets aren't flowing by the time I wake up an hour or so later.
I'm pretty sure I haven't had any real issues with the ea8500 since the upgrade. This leads me to wonder if its related to the SoC, since, as I recall, the ipq40XX used in the ea8300 has (other) issues with its switch.
Is anyone else seeing similar issues?
So I just need to edit the config/wireless file and not the hostapd, right?
Thank you @anomeome 
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My comment was in reply to a case in which a specific channel was configured, not 'auto' (or '0'). If you specify a channel to begin with, the channel list is basically a fall back option for DFS. How hostapd or the kernel determine which channel from this list is picked, I never really investigated. I'm satisfied with the observation that "it just works" (at least for me) 
But good to know auto channel selection seems to have become "smarter" or at least more dynamic these days.
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Yes, you never should or need to edit the hostapd configuration file on OpenWrt. It is automatically generated based on /etc/config/wireless whenever hostapd (re)starts.
So, you add the option to config/wireless and then restart the wifi (or the entire router).
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Thank you @silentcreek
Hi all ,
could someone possibly tell me the current state of 21.02 for WRT1900acs devices , I Currently run an ancient build of david502c build .
last time I checked there were issues with client disconnects , is this still the case ? I'm not entirely sure what people believe the issue is , is it something to do with the wifi driver or is this 3200acm devices?
I have a very simple use case , a few port forwards , a couple dozen clients mostly 2.4GHZ, nothing overly complicated.
Ive seen a lot of posts that suggest they are using the master branch without issue is this the current best option?
thanks in advance for any info .
and thanks to the Openwrt team for working so hard to bring us updates.
I use a WRT32X so similar, I recommend just using the latest master snapshots. I found wifi to be less reliable on 21.02, everything is working well for me on master and it also has kernel 5.10, gcc 11, a ton of luci updates, etc. Performance and reliability is excellent, but there is no doubt wifi is aging. SQM cake at 500mbits, USB 3.0 externeal drive read-write at 120 MB/s, adblock, samba 4, etc.
If you much better wifi just get something like the $99 ubiquiti U6-Lite-US access point to have WiFi 6 features with target wake time (better battery life), ofdma (lower latency), mu-mimo (performance/range), wpa3, Single login for all frequencies, etc. Just turn off wifi on your OpenWrt router and plug in an AP. That's the way to go for really good WiFi because OpenWrt doesn't support some of this newer tech very well yet.
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So choose snapshot from firmware selector , then I have to install a few packages including luci. What can you recommend for a basic setup nothing fancy , also any other settings I should know about ?
I mean I assume I need to do this on snapshot
Yea you can just ssh into the router after the install and paste something like this and you'll have almost everything. This is what I use:
opkg update && opkg install luci irqbalance luci-app-advanced-reboot luci-app-sqm luci-app-adblock luci-app-upnp luci-app-samba4 kmod-usb-storage kmod-usb-storage-uas kmod-usb-ohci kmod-usb-ohci-pci kmod-ata-ahci kmod-usb-uhci kmod-usb3 block-mount usbutils mount-utils luci-app-hd-idle kmod-fs-exfat iperf3 nano
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All you really need is luci to get luci up and running, the rest are absolutely not required - though luci-app-advanced-reboot is probably useful
I also took the plunge with the latest master snapshot (OpenWrt SNAPSHOT r17756) on the WRT1900ACSv2 trying to fix a DSA multiple network bridge setup (didn't fix, but got a work-around using VLANs). Took me a second to figure out that I needed to install luci over ssh. But I agree everything seems to be working so far. Have not tested my OpenVPN setup and finished configuring my Samba4. A project for another day.
opkg update && opkg install luci irqbalance luci-app-advanced-reboot luci-app-sqm luci-app-samba4 block-mount kmod-usb-storage kmod-usb-storage-uas kmod-usb-ohci kmod-usb-ohci-pci luci-app-hd-idle kmod-usb3 kmod-fs-ext4 nano openvpn-openssl luci-app-openvpn luci-app-statistics luci-app-adblock luci-app-ddns luci-app-wol
Run above twice to complete install
- Installed irqbalance. Change 'enabled' from '0' to '1' in '/etc/config/irqbalance'.
- Enabled SQM.
- Patched firmware-88w8864 mwlwifi specific high latencies by disabling tx_amsdu. [Add in luci > startup > local startup (nano /etc/rc.local) the following commands:]
echo "0" >> /sys/kernel/debug/ieee80211/phy0/mwlwifi/tx_amsdu
echo "0" >> /sys/kernel/debug/ieee80211/phy1/mwlwifi/tx_amsdu
And for what it's worth, I am getting substantially faster 5GHz performance with my laptop. Same patch required.
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I upgraded my Buffalo WBMR-HP-G300H today, from 19.07.6, kept the settings. The upgrade itself was smooth, it even retained the custom ADSL firmware that I have to use (the stock one does not connect at all on my noisy line). I was presented by a few prompts about the required configuration changes, accepted them, and... it just works.
My custom script for re-installing previous packages also worked flawlessly.
However, there is one bad news. The curl and ddns-scripts packages are in a sorry state. The default installation includes uclient-fetch which does pretend to be a "wget", and is installed if I run opkg install wget. However, ddns-scripts still complain that neither wget nor curl is installed. OK, so I installed curl. I also have both ca-certificates and ca-bundle (yes I know that work is underway to eliminate the duplication). Result: ddns-scripts now try to use curl, and fail, because SSL support in curl does not really work.
To reproduce the curl problem:
root@Buffalo:~# curl https://google.com/
<HTML><HEAD><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8">
<TITLE>301 Moved</TITLE></HEAD><BODY>
<H1>301 Moved</H1>
The document has moved
<A HREF="https://www.google.com/">here</A>.
</BODY></HTML>
root@Buffalo:~# curl https://ya.ru/
curl: (77) CA signer not available for verification
root@Buffalo:~# curl https://dynv6.com/
curl: (77) CA signer not available for verification
I installed wget-ssl, and it is able to validate these certificates:
root@Buffalo:~# wget --spider --max-redirect=0 --content-on-error https://google.com/
Spider mode enabled. Check if remote file exists.
--2021-10-17 10:39:35-- https://google.com/
Resolving google.com... 2a00:1450:4010:c06::66, 2a00:1450:4010:c06::8a, 2a00:1450:4010:c06::65, ...
Connecting to google.com|2a00:1450:4010:c06::66|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently
Location: https://www.google.com/ [following]
0 redirections exceeded.
root@Buffalo:~# wget --spider --max-redirect=0 --content-on-error https://ya.ru/
Spider mode enabled. Check if remote file exists.
--2021-10-17 10:39:54-- https://ya.ru/
Resolving ya.ru... 2a02:6b8::2:242, 87.250.250.242
Connecting to ya.ru|2a02:6b8::2:242|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 Ok
Length: 60835 (59K) [text/html]
Remote file exists and could contain further links,
but recursion is disabled -- not retrieving.
root@Buffalo:~# wget --spider --max-redirect=0 --content-on-error https://dynv6.com/
Spider mode enabled. Check if remote file exists.
--2021-10-17 10:40:08-- https://dynv6.com/
Resolving dynv6.com... 2a01:4f8:1c1c:4c96::, 2a01:4f9:c010:95b::, 2a03:4000:6:569::, ...
Connecting to dynv6.com|2a01:4f8:1c1c:4c96::|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: unspecified [text/html]
Remote file exists and could contain further links,
but recursion is disabled -- not retrieving.
You have to install "wget-ssl" for "ddns" to work. Curl currently fails due to some issue with SSL certificate included in OpenWRT installation and the wolfssl library to which curl is linked to. Looks like curl linked to openssl (instead of wolfssl) does not have this issue, but there's no curl-openssl package available in the repos.
Upgrade an Netgear Nighthawk X4S R7800 from 19.01 to 21.02 and everything worked like a charm.
Thank you to everyone who supported this great work!
See details her:
After almost 2months of upgrades after the 21.02.0 release.
Do anyone know if there is a general roundup 21.02.1 release planned soon?
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Is there a way to run the migration script after restoring 19.07 settings?
I have a TP-Link WDR3600 with an extroot. I normally upgrade this by:
- taking a backup of settings and a list of user-installed packages;
- rebooting the router without the extroot USB drive;
- doing a sysupgrade;
- copying the new version of OpenWrt onto the extroot USB's system partition;
- rebooting with the extroot;
- restoring the settings from the backup and reinstalling the user-installed packages from the list I'd saved.
But it seems doing this will not be possible due to the changes in the UCI syntax.
Are there any recommendations for upgrading for extroot users?
Two ideas for you.
- Manually edit the setting in the config file in 19.07 just before saving the backup (in sysupgrade), so that the backuped settings already have the new value.
- After rebooting to extroot, copy the migration script (an uci-defaults file)
50-dnsmasq-migrate-resolv-conf-auto.shfrom/rom/etc/uci-defaultsback to/etc/uci-defaults, so that it will be again run at the next boot. After that your could restore the old 19.07 settings and reboot.
(uci-defaults files are always deleted after a successful run, but the originals are still visible in read-only /rom. (Assuming a normal router with overlayfs etc.))
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Just watched shortlog for 21.02.1.
Can anyone explain why 21.02.1 not use Kernel 5.10 as default, but 5.4? It's just doesn't make a sense, every 5.10 related post on this forum about how good it work..
My opinion not use 5.10 as default ASAP was a major mistake for a whole OpenWrt project, mark my words.
And don't tell me anyone who want can use snapshot, anyone who want can build OpenWrt with any kernel he want, we talk about project..