R6220 bridge mode woes

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Hi

My first post here so hello everyone :slight_smile:

I have an Asus BRT AC-828 as my main router with dual WAN connections and about 16 clients. Almost all clients are wired, except for one room where three x86 machines are in use and we can't run a wire there.

The speed on wireless adapters is excellent when connected to the main router, unfortunately good adapters are expensive. One cheap TP-Link I have on hand won't connect at channel auto, needs channel to be set to low range 36-48 or used in 2.4G mode at 173Mbps. So I am trying to use a retired Netgear R6220 in bridge mode to provide a fast connection to these clients. Most of the work is related to file transfers to and from two fileservers on the network.

Except for a few, every client has a static IP, this helps me keep track of them because there are so many. It took a while to figure out how to install the packages and set up the bridge, but it was pretty seamless for a newbie. The biggest hassle I had was switching the IP range to my specific requirement (I do not use the x.x.1.1 subnet) but I knew just enough to SSH into the router and set the parameters.

When I started, the speed was very good, LUCI reported around 650-866Mbps on the link and everything worked well. I was getting great speeds, about 50MB/s both ways so a little lower than my motherboard's AC wireless but not bad at all.

Yesterday however the uploads to the fileservers slowed to a crawl. Downloads have slowed too, down to 25MB/s but still usable. The R6220 is powered up and down regularly and LUCI still shows a fast link but the speeds have been drastically shaved off. I do have the main router channel set to auto, and it is channel 149. Shows up fine at 650Mbps, but uploads are at 12kB/s.

I didn't change a single thing in LUCI or any of the clients, except that I first noticed the problem when I turned on two of the clients at the same time. But going back to single client configuration and a few reboots later, I can't see anything different. The clients don't have the same IP (of course) and even after completely disconnecting all clients but one, the problem persists. When I use the motherboard's AC interface I get 866Mbps and transfers go back up to normal speeds.

Would appreciate some help fixing it because the one week it worked, it was absolutely great. I did update everything that I could from LUCI panel, I tried opkg but I'm not exactly sure how to use it so I stayed away until I hear some possible places to poke around. As far as Linux goes, I'm a total newbie. I have set up a couple fileservers on some SBCs, but I don't have a basic background so I take it very slow.

Thanks for any insights and ideas you can help with.

2

Hi
Would really appreciate some help on this. I looked up relayd but the router then simply did not connect to my main router in client mode, so I had to abandon that approach. I still get excellent transfer speeds but only in one direction.

To eliminate my main router as the source of the problem I tried a TP-Link 150Mbps in its inbuilt WDS mode and got 12MB/s transfer rates, so it's not the Asus blocking uploads and probably a setting I've missed. I would use the TP-Link, but the performance is very limited in both directions.

Other things I've tried was completely disabling the firewall in init.d but no cheese.

I would really appreciate some help.

3

Can you clarify this?

:open_mouth:

What's the [real] problem?

:confused:

12 * 8 == 96

Help with what?

  • You get 96 Mbps on a 150 Mbps link...correct?
  • Did you confuse kiloBytes (kB) megaBytes (MB) and megabits (Mb)?
4

fwiw, there is a known upstream speed issue with Mediatek devices when using Relayd. It may also affect your original issue if you are trying to create an ethernet to wifi adapter (bridge).
https://bugs.openwrt.org/index.php?do=details&task_id=2816

fwiw, if you want a reliable wireless bridge solution (aka ethernet to wifi adapter), try and find a Padavan firmware for the R6220 (sorry, I can't help with a download link). I use Padavan firmware on RT-AC57u to allow wired PCs and devices to use wifi, and it works great on 5 GHz. 250+ mbps possible in both directions according to iperf3 multithread tests.
https://wikidevi.wi-cat.ru/List_of_Padavan_firmware_supported_devices

Otherwise, success with wireless bridging with OpenWrt tends to favour Atheros wifi based routers imho.

2 Likes
5

Bill,

Thanks for that. The solution presented in the link of setting fragmentation threshold to 3000 solved the issue. The default is off, with it at 3000 I'm at 36MB/s up and 50MB/s down, which is adequate given the low cost of the product (free, as it was a spare). I will examine if there are further performance improvements to be had. But now I know where to look, thanks to you :slight_smile:

Ileachi,

I was not confused between MB/s and mbps. I had 650mbps links but the upload speed was limited to 12kB/S. Download was around 40-50MB/s on the same connection.

The 12MB/s reference was the correct speed for a 150mbps link that I got, as an experiment, with a TP-Link 150mbps router. This experiment was to confirm that my main router was not the issue.

6

This topic was automatically closed 10 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.