TP-Link TL-WDR3600 - issues with 19.07.x or ath79?

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

I've been running OpenWRT on my TL-WDR3600 for a while, most recently running the 18.06.x releases on the ar71xx target. I should also note that I am running with extroot configured on a USB thumb drive attached to the WDR3600's USB port.

When 19.07.x was released, I decided to try upgrading to that version, but also migrating from ar71xx to ath79 using these instructions:

https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/ar71xx.to.ath79

I made sure not to preserve settings, and I reconfigured everything from scratch after doing the upgrade. Initially everything seemed great, but after a day or so, the system started randomly rebooting. Sometimes it goes a couple of days between reboots, other times it's just a couple of hours.

I'm wondering if anyone else has had similar issues with this family of routers and an upgrade to 19.07.x, ar71xx to ath79, or both?

1 Like
2

Quick update: I downgraded to 18.06.7 and ar71xx firmware and I've had nearly 48 hours continuous uptime since doing so.

I'm not sure if it was upgrading from ar71xx to ath79, 18.06.7 to 19.07.1, or a combination of the two that was causing the issue...

Has anyone else successfully upgraded their TL-WDR3600 to ath79 + 19.07.1 without experiencing random crashes?

3

I have exactly the same problem on the same router. Have setup remote syslog to see if that gives any further information. I am on 19.07.2.

4

It seems to reboot after this...

Apr 7 17:50:24 OpenWrt kernel: [87299.789611] conntrack: generic helper won't handle protocol 47. Please consider loading the specific helper module.

I've tried...

opkg install kmod-nf-nathelper-extra

Waiting now...

5

Didn't work. Downgraded to 18.06.8.

Waiting now...

1 Like
6

Three and a half days since downgrading and no reboots.. so my experience is the same as OP

7

My TL-WDR3600 have been running 19.07.0 (yes, too lazy to upgrade) for over 63 days.

8

Sorry to reopen the topic after some time ...

I am having the same problem with this router as described by you, but I am using version 19.07.7 in ath79 ... with extroot on the pendrive too ...

The interesting thing is that before I was using version 19.07.6 previously, with extroot and everything ... the only difference is that I use it as a dumb AP ...

I downgraded from 19.07.7 to 19.07.6 in the hope of stopping the reboots and it didn't stop ... I changed the thumb drive because the old one had some bad sectors ...

In the log, I don't see anything abnormal that could be causing the reboots ... I think that I will configure the external syslog to see more data.

What I'm going to try now is to get this router back to the standard TP-Link firmware and then upgrade again to Openwrt ...