I searched at google and this forum to find a solution for my issue without luck. Perhaps someone can give me a hint or the solution of this problem. I flashed the router with openwrt 22.03.3 and I am trying to get it running as client. WLAN is a Samsung A53 5G hotspot, the router should connect as client and connect a LAN device to the WLAN. I configured the 5G to connect to the hotspot, seems to be working. But I don´t get it linked with the LAN interface properly. I suppose I am missing something with the configuration in general, either DHCP issues, the linking or perhaps some firewall issue?
The stock firmware is quite easy to setup for the client mode but there was just the issue not to be able to use channel 149 with 5 GHz WLAN.
From the looks of your post, if you want to use the TP-Link to be able to add LAN devices to the A53's hotspot, that you are looking to configure your TP-Link as a client bridge.
It sounds like you have the WiFi client connection set up. But to bridge a WiFi connection across to the LAN (or other WiFi radio) you need one of two things extra:
A special WDS/four-address WiFi mode on BOTH the client and server.
A special helper interface on the client, called relayd.
Since you are unlikely to be able to meet the requirements for #1 (very difficult to do across vendors and firmwares), I would refer you to a a great wiki article setting up for #2. This is one of the first things I did with an OpenWrt device, and I know from experience that the article's procedure works well.
If you have further questions, searching for the term "client bridge" on the forum should bring up some further discussions. I started a couple threads myself with questions about a client bridge and bridging a second WiFi radio in, and about using WireGuard in that scenario.
There is a bug in the mt76 driver that prevents you from getting any real signal out of them, at least on the 5ghz interface. Its all a bit beyond me but it appears to be reading the wireless adapter firmware incorrectly and thus you will be locked at 6dbm. But there is a fix on github, I am unsure if it has made its way into master yet or if it ever will as its a bit of a hack:
Thanks alot. At least I got my head around this topic much more with this info. I also found a very suitable article on github, "Relayd Wireless Bridge in OpenWRT". Very short and quick how-to. I did set everything up and i get a ping reply within the diag aswell as a tracert. But i run into a problem with the relayd software package. When updating the lists I get "unable to execute opkg update command: syntaxerror: unexpected end of JSON input".
Any idea how to fix this?
Thanks in advance and also thanks for the warm welcome and immediate help.
You say you can ping, is that just internally or can you also ping an outside address? Try to ping both, say, google.com and 1.1.1.1. That will tell you if you have DNS and external connectivity.
Are you using opkg directly, or from the web UI?
If you are SSHing into the unit, can you try a few things?
Post the full output of opkg update
What is the contents of your /etc/opkg/distfeeds.conf? cat /etc/opkg/distfeeds.conf
What happens if you try and wget one of the files in distfeeds.conf manually? wget $(cat /etc/opkg/distfeeds.conf | grep https | grep -v \# | tail -n 1 | cut -d " " -f 3)
Just adding in here: I recently tried OpenWRT on my TL-WR902AC v3 thinking that the ability to use WPA3 would make good sense for a travel router. I gave up on WPA3 after discovering my laptop couldn't properly connect in both Windows and Linux. After running it purely as a Wi-Fi repeater/router (i.e. WISP) for a few days and predominantly connecting via 5 GHz, I found that the 5 GHz interface consistently flaked out at least once per day, even with a daily scheduled reboot.
I reverted back to OEM firmware for the stability. Point being, even if you get a connection to work over 5 GHz, it may be not be worth it over using the stock firmware.
One good thing that came of this is that I flashed the EU firmware, which is the most recently updated (Feb. 2023) OEM firmware and supports 2.4 GHz channel 13. In the long run though I do hope the issues with 5 GHz on OpenWRT get resolved as TP-Link will inevitably stop issuing updates.
first of all, sorry for the late reply here. I finally had some time to reinvestigate this subject yesterday evening. It finally works after going through some articles. Thanks Va1der for helping me out.
Useful was the first article to get my head around this subject, the second one is the final manual I used to get it working. I have to add, that I used a 2.4 GHz this time, I don't know if this makes a difference. The first time I used a 5 GHz. I probably will check it another time.
