Problem with WiFi interfaces on a Linksys EA6350 v4

Hello everyone.

I have a Linksys EA6350 v4 router on which I have installed OpenWrt 23.05.5 r24106-10cc5fcd00 (it's like the third version of OpenWRT that I've installed since I've been using it, a newer version every time it's reinstalled), there are also two Netgear WAC104 wireless access points. On all the devices I have DAWN installed and configured, the WiFi interfaces of the three devices are configured the same, with the same parameters for both WiFi and DAWN.

On the Netgear WAC104 DAWN the WiFi interfaces work well and DAWN works normally, however I have had problems with the WiFi interfaces of the Linksys EA6350 v4 router, as they stopped working. The first few times I installed OpenWRT on the Linksys EA6350 v4 router everything worked fine, however, as the Linksys EA6350 v4 router has the drawback that, if it is rebooted more than three times due to power problems, the web administration interface reverts to the original Linksys firmware, so I have to reinstall and configure OpenWRT from scratch, which has happened to me three or four times. This process has been done just as it was done the first times, as I have a text file with all the steps and configurations that are required and that worked the first times.

The last few times it has happened to me, after installing and configuring the router, the WiFi interfaces do not come up, they remain disabled.

If I scan the networks on the Linksys EA6350 v4, they find the neighboring access points, both in the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands.

This tells me that the WiFi interfaces are not damaged and are fully functional. However, after performing the scan, they remain in the following state.

And they just don't provide service.

If I do a channel scan on the Linksys EA6350 v4 it shows me this:

Here comes the strange part, why are there two 2.4GHz network interfaces? As you can see in the images above, there is a 2.4GHz interface, radio0 and radio1, which is not true, there should be only one, radio0. And as you can see, the 2.4GHz radio1 interface does not show any channel, what I see is that there are two interfaces with the same name, radio1 2.4GHz and radio1 5GHz. I don't know if this is what causes both interfaces not to work.

The etc/config/wireless file is like this:


config wifi-device 'radio0'
option type 'mac80211'
option path '1e140000.pcie/pci0000:00/0000:00:00.0/0000:01:00.0'
option channel 'auto'
option band '2g'
option htmode 'HT20'
option cell_density '0'

config wifi-iface 'default_radio0'
option device 'radio0'
option network 'lan'
option mode 'ap'
option ssid 'DEXTER'
option encryption 'psk2+ccmp'
option key 'xxxxxxxxxxxxx'
option ieee80211r '1'
option mobility_domain '4f57'
option reassociation_deadline '1000'
option ft_over_ds '0'
option ft_psk_generate_local '1'
option bss_transition '1'
option ieee80211k '1'

config wifi-device 'radio1'
option type 'mac80211'
option path '1e140000.pcie/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:02:00.0'
option channel 'auto'
option band '5g'
option htmode 'VHT40'
option cell_density '0'

config wifi-iface 'default_radio1'
option device 'radio1'
option network 'lan'
option mode 'ap'
option ssid 'DEXTER'
option encryption 'psk2+ccmp'
option key 'xxxxxxxxxxxxx'
option ieee80211r '1'
option mobility_domain '4f57'
option reassociation_deadline '1000'
option ft_over_ds '0'
option ft_psk_generate_local '1'
option bss_transition '1'
option ieee80211k '1'

I don't know what else I can do or configure, it seems to be an OpenWRT problem and not a router problem.

I would greatly appreciate it if you could help me solve this problem.

I found the solution myself. When reinstalling or updating the firmware, you have to perform a factory reset and reconfigure OpenWRT from scratch.

I came to this conclusion when updating the two Netgear WAC104 APs, the OpenWRT version they had installed was 23.05.5, I updated them to version 24.10.0 and in both of them the same thing happened as with the Linksys EA6350 v4, the WiFi interfaces stopped working, so I did a factory reset on all three devices, reconfigured everything from scratch and now the WiFi interfaces work correctly on the two Netgear WAC104 APs and the Linksys EA6350 v4.

Apparently the data stored in the partitions is what causes the problem and when resetting them to factory all the partitions are formatted, leaving them clean.