Hi
New user here.
Managed to get OpenWRT on a Pi 4 and I also have an ALFA AWUS036ACM.
What I'd like to do is use the built in Wifi on the Pi as WLAN0 and WLAN1 as the ALFA.
How would I reverse them?
Additionally, when I disconnect the ethernet cable, the internal wifi, while connected to the internet, won't pass user traffic from the ALFA to the internet (cannot ping 8.8.8.8).
Wanting to build this as a travel router to be able to use ethernet as needed, but mostly use the two wifi.
Thanks
The short answer is, you can't - and there's not really any point doing so.
It's a router, not a mind-reader, it just follows what you configured - if you unplug a cable, that just means there won't be any internet anymore, not that it magically reconfigures itself to use another interface as uplink.
I guess travelmate may have some support for that, though.
For the idea of automatically switching between ethernet and wifi as the uplink, @slh is correct that you can probably use Travelmate (which is really useful for the travel scenario in general).
The other way to do it is to use mwan3 and/or assign metrics to the uplink interfaces.
time to read up on travelmate - it's installed but not exactly sure how to work it yet.
You would be far better off just buying an OpenWrt supported travel router and putting Travelmate on it (will cost in the region of ~$30 or less). Then you will have a tiny, truly portable, reliable, all in one device that just needs a usb power supply to work.
This will do everything you could want from a "Travel Router" and free up the expensive and hard to get Pi for the type of projects it was designed for.
+1000 to this. There is also the benefit of the fact that they are fully integrated devices from a physical standpoint... you don't need to have USB wifi adapters hanging off the main device, and things like antennas are either internal, or designed to fold neatly and reliably out of the way so that things are less likely to break.
If you really want to, it is possible to change the numbering of the wifi radios by editing the name in the wifi-device section of /etc/config/wireless. Do not stray too far from the format of 'radioX' so there won't be conflicts with other names.
Always plug a USB radio into exactly the same one of the 4 physical USB ports on the Pi, or it will be detected as a new radio and assigned a new name.
In order to use a third-party wifi as the link to the Internet, it is necessary to have that wifi STA alone in its own network (not a bridge), usually named wan (available by default) or wwan (created by the "Join this network" script in LuCI). The firewall zone for the wan must have masquerade enabled so that pakets are NATted as they leave the router.
I was thinking about the GL INET series of routers - except I would probably opt to getting a Beryl or Slate model. Still, that's about $100 here in Canada. I already have a Pi4 sitting around doing nothing. I also have a Pi3B+ doing nothing as well.
Everything has been moved off these Pi's and onto a docker instance running on my Synology NAS. Figured I'd try to get this all working on a Pi before I went with a GL Inet router.