OpenWrt 22.03.5 fifth service release

Good to know. Thanks to all our devs who are doing amazing work! :wink:

Some update for DIR-885L HW A1: I have switched to this FW Version: 10.10.122.45 CRC: 964bc676 Date: Wed 2017-05-31
md5sum ./brcmfmac4366b-pcie.bin 92d1baab27d88b3ff1c9b9a39c33b0b4
from here:

and it looks pretty stable and better than any one from Openwrt repos.

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Your dir-885 custom firmware engagement is awesome.
But if you are interested in maintaining currated news about custom builds of the dir-885, my recommendation would be, you open up a new dedicated thread e.g. „dir-885 custom builds“ in the community builds section of the forum.

That would give such dir-885 custom firmware news some needed structure instead of occasional „look here, I found something new“ shotgun postings in various threads. Users are aware to search for a device via Google, Wiki or forum search and would eventually find such a thread, in case you are worrying that people might miss your news.

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The same problem happens to me about "obtaining IP address" and the culprit is dnsmasq, but I solved it by replacing dnsmasq with odhcpd + Unbound on the main router (no dumb AP) following the steps in this guide:

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well for dumb ap you do not need any of that.

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Familiar issue to me. It looks like the problem is still present in 22.03.5.
For me, the problem has been around in several releases so far.
it occurs kind of random to me, sometimes weeks, sometimes months without issues. And then suddenly some kind of DHCP resource seems to deplete and devices which still have a valid lease will still work, while all devices that reconnect from then on seem offline, as if they do not get an IP via DHCP. my workaround so far: reboot main router.

Found other people with older similar sounding posts outside of OpenWRT:
https://www.mail-archive.com/dnsmasq-discuss@lists.thekelleys.org.uk/msg15776.html

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Or restart the "dnsmasq" service, but the problem will occur again later.

Maybe try DNSMasq 2.89 from snapshot in 22.03.5 release. I've been running it since it came out without issue.

I was hoping it would get backported but it didn't.

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I flash OpenWrt Snapshot on the main router (no dumb AP) and I haven't had the problem.

  • dnsmasq v2.86 from OpenWrt 22.03.5 is broken and "obtaining IP address" problem happens.
  • dnsmasq v2.89 from OpenWrt Snapshot the problem is fixed.

If you are using OpenWrt 22.03.5, I recommend that you replace dnsmasq with odhcpd + Unbound on the main router or flash OpenWrt Snapshot on the main router if you don't want to replace dnsmasq.

@account4538 Thank you very much for the solution and I hope that the developers update dnsmasq to version 2.89 (2023-02-04) in the next OpenWrt 22.03.6 service release, because this is a big problem and if OpenWrt stable continues using older dnsmasq version 2.86 (2021-09-08) people will have the same problem mentioned above and they will think that it is the fault of the router model or dumb AP or WLAN drivers, when the culprit is dnsmasq.

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Hoping for the best, but I don’t see any clue in the 2.87-2.89 changelog about such a bug being fixed:
https://thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/CHANGELOG

I've since realized that it isn't just limited to clients not getting an IP address but the local ntp program on the WNDR3700 v4 not keeping the time updated. In 5 days updtime it lost 5 hours. Clicking "restart" on ntpd in luci did resync the time.

This time I did explore a bit and it did show plenty of memory. I haven't rebooted so if anyone has ideas of what I should check, I'm all ears.

root@ap:~# cat /proc/meminfo 
MemTotal:         121748 kB
MemFree:           79828 kB
MemAvailable:      62516 kB
Buffers:               0 kB
Cached:            11704 kB
SwapCached:            0 kB
Active:             8872 kB
Inactive:           6148 kB
Active(anon):        264 kB
Inactive(anon):     3272 kB
Active(file):       8608 kB
Inactive(file):     2876 kB
Unevictable:           0 kB
Mlocked:               0 kB
SwapTotal:             0 kB
SwapFree:              0 kB
Dirty:                 0 kB
Writeback:             0 kB
AnonPages:          3324 kB
Mapped:             3888 kB
Shmem:               228 kB
KReclaimable:       3040 kB
Slab:               9828 kB
SReclaimable:       3040 kB
SUnreclaim:         6788 kB
KernelStack:         368 kB
PageTables:          372 kB
NFS_Unstable:          0 kB
Bounce:                0 kB
WritebackTmp:          0 kB
CommitLimit:       60872 kB
Committed_AS:      12264 kB
VmallocTotal:    1048372 kB
VmallocUsed:        2996 kB
VmallocChunk:          0 kB
Percpu:               96 kB


True, after 5 days working, my dhcp stopped working. I had to reboot the router to make it work again.
Should be great to have 22.03.6 fixing it.

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Three options to solve this:

  1. Love it: be grateful that someone else is doing the hard work of maintaining this embedded Linux distribution and provides code and binaries for free. And you get support here for free.
  2. Change it: update the dnsmasq package in the 22.03 branch by yourself and work on eliminating bugs that come up. Or pay some dev doing it.
  3. Leave it: reinstall your OEM firmware. You paid your device OEM for it. If you feel the OEM packages are too old: ask customer support.

But don't randomly complain about other people providing software for free. This does not help in any way.

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The default IPv4 DHCP client program is udhcpc. dnsmasq is a DHCP and DNS server.

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I'm sure that the culprit is dnsmasq, because when the "obtaining IP address" error happens, it is temporarily fixed by restarting the "dnsmasq" service on the main router (no dumb AP) (temporarily because the problem occurs again later).

In OpenWrt 22.03.5 the problem is solved by replacing dnsmasq with odhcpd + Unbound on the main router and in OpenWrt Snapshot the problem is fixed.

If replacing dnsmasq with odhcpd + Unbound in OpenWrt 22.03.5 is also replacing udhcpc (busybox) then you need to update dnsmasq and busybox to the latest version to fix this problem in OpenWrt Stable, because this problem is years old (you can type "obtaining IP address" in google) and it has already been fixed but only in OpenWrt Snapshot.

OpenWrt 22.03.5: (Broken)

  • dnsmasq v2.86 (2021-09-08)
  • busybox v1.35 (2021-12-26)

OpenWrt Snapshot: (Fixed)

  • dnsmasq v2.89 (2023-02-04)
  • busybox v1.36 (2023-01-03)

I hope someone takes note, because this bug/error is very serious and can be fixed.

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That’s a suggestion, not a solution.

A solution would be if you would update the package in the 22.03 branch by yourself. Please do so.

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The "problem" IMO version 22.03.5 is marked as stable version and it's not (I'm not accusing anyone of nothing). I hope next version will be fixed.

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Several more changes for dnsmasq were committed after March 2022 where 22.03 was branched:
https://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt%2Fopenwrt.git&a=search&h=HEAD&st=commit&s=dnsmasq

Which commits need to be backported?

If you have an idea, you could create an issue and prepare to test, provide information and help at https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/issues

It seems our friend @anon11662642 has tested and found a solution.

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Mentioning package versions is not a solution for the 23.03 branch. If he is happy with development snapshot builds: run them.

Complaining about a 23.03 package and don't doing anything about this branch does not help. If you want a change: dig into the details, create an issue, provide code, test.

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