[Solved] PPPoE in latest releases - wndrmacv2

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Hello OpenWrt users,
I used OpenWrt on my Netgear wndrmacv2 successfully for years, latest release I had was Chaos Calmer if i'm not mistaken. Also I had root partition moved to USB drive. At some point in time I moved to a new flat and took router with me. When I tried to set up PPPoE connection I found out 50% of router functionality was broken. Seemed that my USB flash drive had died. So I decided to kinda 'start new life from scratch' and flashed router with latest stable release (it happened a week ago).
What I discovered is that when I try to setup PPPoE connection on my WAN iface it just doesn't work. Config in /etc/config/network seems fine, Eth1 iface is there, logread says it detected atheros based chip, but in logs I see absolutely no signs of pppd trying to connect to my ISP, even with debug option. Luci says all required packages for pppoe are installed. After hours of useless investigations I tried to flash 3 different releases including oldstable (LEDE) but situation hasn't changed.
So my question is - are all builds being tested on all supported routers? I just do not see any mistakes in my configuration. All I do after flashing firmware is I go to Luci web configuration for WAN iface and I change it from DHCP to PPPoE and enter credentials given by my ISP. That's it. After that I try to restart network via ssh, reboot router, press reconnect button in web UI several times, but log is empty and it just seems to me that pppd is dead.
Is there any way someone can check if my assumption is correct? Or can some DEVs look at this?

P.S. For now I flashed router back to stock NetGear firmware and all works just fine. So the issue is 100% openwrt related.

2

Is this the device your referring too
https://openwrt.org/toh/hwdata/netgear/netgear_wndr3800

3

Yes it's the same as wndr3800. Only some adoptions for Apple Mac in stock firmware and a bit different LED layout. 128Mb RAM. One of the images I tried was taken from https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/18.06.2/targets/ar71xx/generic/ (search for wndrmacv2 on this page).

4
  1. I assume you did Save & Apply the changes not just Save
  2. Did you do a clean upgrade without keeping settings ?
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5

What about in dmesg "Kernel Log"

for example you should see something similar to

# dmesg | grep ppp
[  122.267835] pppoe-wan: renamed from ppp0

You should also see the pppd process

# ps | grep pppd
 1905 root      1212 S    /usr/sbin/pppd nodetach ipparam wan ifname pppoe-wan
6

I'll need to flash router back to openwrt and try it. I'm in gmt+3 timezone, it will take a while cause i'm at work now. Thanks for looking into this. I'll try to provide output asap.

7

Btw i've noticed that web UI says pppoe-wan while in config /etc/config/network it's 'wan' only, not sure if this is correct or not.

8

It is correct

9

I'm running 18.06 HEAD (so newer than the official releases) with PPPoE myself. No problems whatsoever. PPP gets very few bumps, and never major ones in release trees. Your topic title is click-bait.

There surely is something wrong, but I suggest you adapt your topic title to something less tendentious.

10

I feel really frustrated right now. I came home and re-flashed router one more time with latest stable release. I connected it to ISP via factory gigabit patch cord. Went into config and instead of going to wireless first I went to WAN config right away and configured PPPoE settings. All worked right out of the box. I really see no difference from what I did previous times. Logread is full of pppd messages and all works fine.
Thanks for you help, not sure what happened but now I'm a happy openwrt user again...

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