After having to go for a hard factory reset, my OpenWRT 19.07.1 installation on a HW-C108 shows some strange behaviour: After each reboot, all configuration changes are lost. I thought at first the jffs2 filesystem ist rebuilt every time instead of only the first time, but that is not the case. Most obvious, the admin password is stored alright.
To check, what happens, I ssh'd into /etc/config, then did
echo teststring > testfile
touch *
i.e. did not modify any configuration items, but updated timestamps. After rebooting, I found the testfile with the correct contents, but all the other config files had their previous timestamps, instead of the updated ones.
So obviously some buggy mechanism overwrites the config files at boot time. I'm not particularly familiar with the OpenWRT boot process, so I'm a bit at a loss at where to look for this issue. Any idea?
I have solved it the brute way: another hard factory reset. Difference is, this time it was by pressing reset 10s in normal operating mode. The first time it was by issueing jffs2reset in failsafe mode. Seems the latter does not quite cut it, despite of what the docs say.
Nevertheless, maybe that upgrade is a good idea, as I have noticed several other forms of buggy behaviour.