OpenWRT supported switch recommendations?

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

Hello everyone

I am currently using 4 of TP-Link's cheap smart managed switches (TL-SG108E) at home and have been happy with them, until I found out that they can exhibit errant behavior when using VLANs.

My network would work mostly ok, except for some weird transient issues like pages sometimes taking a few seconds to begin loading or a device not connecting to wifi, which would occur intermittently and resolve themselves, at least temporarily, on their own.

After many, many months of trying to troubleshoot, I managed to figure out that one of the TL-SG108Es sometimes just starts flooding IGMP traffic, and all of them have issues with packet corruption on trunk ports (known issue, I found out lately).

Given that I already run OpenWRT on my access points and like it quite a lot, I am looking for some small, fanless, cheap 8 port gigabit switches that can be flashed to OpenWRT and support 802.1q VLANS. Ideally I'd also like to get LACP, L3 inter VLAN switching and 802.1x, but maybe that'd be asking too much.

Any suggestions?

2

dunno about features,
but here's a list of supported openwrt devices - https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_extended_all
enter switch in the top left device type field, to get switches only.

3

What you are viewing as packet corruption is just a reporting issue. Check out post #20 from TP-Link in your linked thread.

4

OpenWrt works the same on all supported rtl838x routers (rtl839x and even more so rtl93xx are another topic, their support is very basic and experimental), differences only include the hardware features (numbers/ types of ports, flash- and RAM size), how easy you can do the initial OpenWrt flash or get a serial console access.

PoE is the only aspect that might need a little more attention, as there are different strategies (and PoE MCUs) involved here, most -but not all- supported, so if you want that, check the situation before.

5

There are a number of supported 8-port devices that work quite well. In my house, I use

  • ZyXEL GS1900-8HP (with PoE)
  • Netgear GS108Tv3 (can be powered by PoE)
  • Netgear GS308T

All of them are easy to flash (i.e. from the OEM web interface), but the port LEDs do not work on the GS308T without a workaround.

6

Hi Andy

I have a GS308T and wanted to try openwrt on it. I could not find the "factory" firmware but found this:
https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/23.05.0/targets/realtek/rtl838x/openwrt-23.05.0-realtek-rtl838x-netgear_gs308t-v1-initramfs-kernel.bin

Is this initramfs same as factory? Install using the netgear web interface?

Also, you say that port LED work with work around. Is that relatively simple. LED come in handy when we are debugging.

Thanks and LMK.

7

Check this regarding LED support.
Installation via the OEM web interface did work fine for me, if I remember correctly, the instructions for the GS108Tv3 apply - see the Wiki.

8

It worked like a charm.
First downgraded both the image partition to the oldest netgear stock firmware.
Then, I applied the initramfs to image 1
then I used the openwrt LUCI to sysupgrade to 23.05.0 (as on the wiki)
Then I created two vlans as I run one for Lan & NAS and the other for IOT and Guests.

All well so far.

Question:

  1. sometimes see this error on Luci / Network interface:
RangeError
Maximum call stack size exceeded

How can I remedy this error?

And,

Should I go and do the same for image2 partition as well.

appreciate your help.

9

Why not 23.05.2? There are several bugs on 23.05.0 on the Realtek target.

No, there is no point in doing so. OpenWrt does not support image 2. You can, however, use this partition to restore stock, simply by booting the second image.

1 Like
10

The wiki gave me that. I will make custom image (at https://firmware-selector.openwrt.org/ ) and remove firewall4 + add material theme to it (eye candy!). If I wish to add DHCP server to it (has lot of space when I check luci/software ~ 55mb) should I add:

dnsmasq-full
luci-proto-ipv6
odhcp6c
odhcpd-ipv6only

Any thing else?

OK.

To boot second image, I will ssh and then

 /usr/sbin/fw_setenv boot_part 2

I did that once after a electrical surge that somehow knocked me into second image on EA8500.

Thanks for your help.

11

This does not work in the GS308T. I also tried this 1 and 2 both.
It keeps booting into Openwrt.

Anil

12

I overcame my fear and added following to firmware selectors existing packages:

dnsmasq-full luci-proto-ipv6 odhcp6c odhcpd-ipv6only wsdd2 nano  luci-theme-material

And I created a sos interface and turned on dhcp and it works perfectly thus far.

13

Unfortunately, the Wiki pages are often not up-to-date wrt the current version. That said, the page was for a different device anyway :wink:

There is no real advantage in doing so, apart from a slight increase in available storage space. The firewall is disabled anyway.

No, it doesn't. It has 32MiB of which less than 16MiB are actually usable. You're probably mixing it up with the available RAM.

Nope, this doesn't work on the Netgears. It's a different setting:

fw_setsys bootpartition 1

See this for reference.

That's quite a lot of full-blown packages. Just installing dnsmasq would have been sufficient to act as a DHCP server.

1 Like
14

Thank you so much for all the clarifications. Much appreciate.