Anyone currently running openwrt on the any of the newly supported tp-link APs (EAP-225,245…etc)? I am very interested in the performance of the firmware as currently on my stock EAPs I am getting signal dropouts and have to reconnect clients to get things back stable quite often. What are your current experiences?
Eap245 works as well as with original firmware but with wpa3 and multi ssid and multi vlan.
But that is if I reconfig it as a real business access point in the way it is buildt and sold to be.
In that you mean how you set up OpenWRT from the default settings? Have you had to reflash to stock yet? Wondering if it’s terribly difficult to do, incase things go sideways that is.
Haven’t tried go to stock firmware yet. But I have two so it took a couple of months to config the OpenWRT one.
As long as you are playing with configs you can’t really break it that bad so the reset button doesn’t work.
Remove pretty much everything in all the configs and build the configs from scratch. Everything with firewall and dhcp was stopped as processes.
When I build using imagebuilder I stopped the above processes and also changed the lan protocol to dhcp client so it possible to actually connect to it from a network.
OpenWRT configs it as a router as first setup, that is kind of useless for a Accesspoint.
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I was wondering about that first setup process. How did you go about initially setting it up? Did you use a serial console to get it initially configured on one and then copy the running config to the other or did you build the image from scratch with the needed configs in place?
The commits that add support into the OpenWrt tree contain full instructions on how to flash the devices with OpenWrt. Have an EAP235-Wall myself and I did not need serial, nor will you when installing an EAP225/EAP245 I reckon. For most users that's a bridge too far.
That being said, if things go wrong serial is very handy.
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I don’t move configs ever, to much headache and compatibility issues.
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-developer/uci-defaults
Use uci-defaults insted.
And only make as little and minimum required changes as possible in the image because there is no backup if you screw this up in the actual firmware.
The rest of configs you do on a working system!
Everything you do in imagebuilder should have manually been tried on a working setup at first if it doesn’t work then it surely won’t work if you burn it to the memory.
I have two devices of each I use just to handle the blood pressure when they crash. A lot of users here should also have more devices since it is good for the health.
You can solder a connector for serial as wiki describes, I haven’t done that yet because I didn’t feel worried because I have been doing OpenWRT for almost four years now on three different devices so is wasn’t really any unknowns to setup this device.
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Once flashed with the openwrt firmware, do they include the already activated “openwrt” WiFi ssid for setup?
The ssid is there as usual but OpenWRT never has a wifi activated.
I read that in the quick start guide just after I posted that probably gonna have to look into how to rub the UCI Defaults on fist boot then in order to get into the config page after installing the firmware.
I haven’t installed OpenWRT yet, because both my boxes apparently have problems with the wifi chip mt76xx. Some have given up hope but I’m holding my breath since there’s attempts going on to fix it.
Which EAP do you have?
EAP235-Wall and EAP245-v3
Master already has a newer mt76 driver that should fix the MT7613 issue. So does 21.02 HEAD but you'll have to wait for the next point release for images that include it (or compile it yourself).
I'm running the EAP235-Wall with 21.02 HEAD and it works just fine now for me. Main one (for three of which two in service) has been up for 18 days (basically since last update) and my wife does video calls all day for work.
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No issues with stability or video calls stuttering badly? Also how was the install process? Did you need to do anything outside of normal OpenWRT setup for an AP?
The commit has full installation instructions:
That's all you need. No complaints about stability personally. You can still revert to stock if needed. Instructions in that very same commit.
I’ve been running 21.02 and subsequently 21.02.1 more recently on two EAP245v3’s since each version was released, haven’t had any issues to date, very happy overall.
Followed instructions on the device page to install from factory firmware to 21.02.
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Good I might have to give this a try then. I’ve always liked openwrt and the price for the APs was/is very good for what you get. It’s too bad the software side of it is lacking.
I’ve been running openwrt on two EAP225s now for a few days but I’ve been having issues enabling 802.11r for some devices which leaves them unable to connect. Is anyone else having issues enabling 802.11r on some devices with this build 21.02?