The Ultimate DAWN Q&A

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Every year, for one or other reason, I have to touch DAWN, a new router, a faulty router, or something that comes to my mind and I need to tweak

The problem is that my memory is so bad that after 12 months I can't barely remind a thing of what I did to make my DAWN work and I have to spend a zillion hours to recover.

The two main resources are:

And

But, at least for me, both are incomplete and complement each other, not without a big chunk of trial and error until I get to the point I left before.

So today I was thinking: What if I compile a Q&A with anyone that would like to participate, trying to document as much as possible and pass all the compiled ideas to the Wiki guide in a better and structured way, so if in the future, I need to start from scratch, I don't hit my head for several hours/days.

Starting from here, my findings today:

  1. wpad-openssl vs wpad-wolfssl: Long story short: wpad-openssl has more things, if I'm installing a big router, go with openssl, if it's a little router, go with wolfssl. Don't think much more about this
  2. I have to uninstall whichever wpad-basic-* packages before installing any of these two. This can come in multiple flavors. Just uninstall all
  3. Add these 3 elements to /etc/config/wireless:
        option ieee80211r '1'
        option ieee80211k '1'
        option bss_transition '1'
  1. Reboot the router. Restarting the network, for some reason, is not enough. Maybe I have to restart some other service I have not figured out yet.
  2. Check with ubus -v list for hostapd.<your-wifi-name>. It can be wlan0 or wl1-ap0 or something like that. And inside check for bss_transition_request (ignore the wnm_disassoc_imminent as it was dropped in OWRT 23+)
  3. Install dawn with opkg install dawn
  4. Install dawn for LuCI: luci-app-dawn

Dawn configuration

In config network

  1. option broadcast ip to the network broadcast

To-Do

  • I vaguely remember there was a list of options for the wireless device. I've only found these 3. But there were a couple
    -- I've found: option macfilter, list maclist and wnm_sleep_mode. Also I'm not sure if ieee80211r is necessary at all. Review al these options to see which are worthy.
  • Test this guy's configs.
  • Read all the way through here to extract all golden nuggets

To be continued…

2

LOL I use onenote from Microsoft to keep notes of stuff that interests me, I got notes from 20 years ago that untested me -- you might want to think of something similar I usually just copy paste commands just to remind me

3

Uh, the first two are just the same?

4

If you don't want vendor lockin to one specific tool and platform consider wither Obsidian (freeware, stores data in plain Markdown files, which is a standard format, pay for sync, but you can use your own alternative sync solution instead) of Logseq (completely open source, also Markdown based).

There are other like Joplin as well (which I hear is more similar to EverNote), but I haven't tried that.

5

No, the idea is not about documenting with a notes app, but sharing the best configs and updating overtime. I've seen that DAWN is am ever growing project, so instead of wasting time configuring I would rather invest it in testing new features and commenting about them with the community