Something is disabling my wifi

Installing and Using OpenWrt Network and Wireless Configuration
1

I have three OpenWrt devices, in two different locations. One of them is a TP-Link WRD4300, that I use as a dumb access point.

On this device only, after the device has been running for months, both radios shut down. When this happens, I log into the device, and see a "option disabled '1'" line on each radio.

The first time this happened, I thought "this is weird". The second time I thought "perhaps I added those lines, without rebooting the device, and I do not remember now". But this has happened again, and now I am pretty sure it was not me.

I am not paranoid, I do not think any government is after me. And I use very strong passwords for wifi and SSH, I am convinced there isn't a neighbor hacking into my network.

All other options discarded, I think it has to be some piece of software running in this machine, that disables both wifi radios. But I cannot think what, why, or how...

This device runs a stripped down image, that I build using the image builder. There is no LuCi interface where I could be doing this myself by mistake. And this has happened with several versions of OpenWrt.

Does anyone have an idea of what could be happening here?

2

Do you have a Wi-Fi enable button ?
Maybe something is knocking it or a false trigger

that unit has a switch, maybe it's off or intermittent

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Any crontab running?

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4

If you talk about 5ghz band it is 99% certain it is a radar signal

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5

Yes, the device has a button, but I never configured it... let me have a look at that!

6

Nope, nothing at all...

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I talk about both bands, and I talk about a change in the configuration file, not just a DFS issue; but thanks!

8

ps does not show any rogue process running?

9

Probably you need wpad without -basic- for all options to work in conf file.

10

It looks like a switch not button and often on other routers they are configured by default
the only notable thing is tho the config changes it's not saved
so a power cycle will return the saved config
that's at lest for the toggle buttons on my devices

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11

I firmware update/downgrade could help to discard (or not) something related to a software bug (wifi driver/hostapd...)

12

This is it!!!

The device has a little "wifi on/off" switch on the back (pretty close to the power button); I am pretty sure nobody has been playing with that switch, and it's probably a hardware glitch, but somehow the device has been detecting "action" on this switch and disabling wifi.

Case closed, many thanks everybody for your help!!!

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13

Worth adding to wiki?

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14

Yes, good idea; I will have to have a look at that, this weekend.

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15

The switch or button will call a script in /etc/rc.button (probably named rfkill) that changes the config. Find that script and remove it, or chmod -x the file to remove execute permission.

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16

I'd add logging to it logger "Dying now env=$(env) locals=$(set)" or something, comment out the "kill" lines and leave it on to see if I could use it to figure out the circumstances under which it was being triggered...

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