I'm rapidly finding out that I would have benefited from a bit of a networking primer before jumping in to OpenWRT!
I am just setting up a small office for myself and am looking to run a mix of wifi and wired 3D printers on a network hosted on a Netgear Nighthawk (it's going spare) for the internet connection I would like to use the OpenWRT RaspberryPi to connect to my Phone's wifi hotspot and the netgear connect to the RPi as if it were a modem.
I can see a lot of great documentation but in these early days the terminology is a learning curve! What are the correct terms for what I am looking at?
I'll post more tomorrow but I've got something partially working following a guide, but things are a bit slow and the broadband speed checker website wouldn't connect. Makes me think I've done something wrong, and then saw the double NAT issue mentioned elsewhere and wondered if I'd fallen for that?
While it's not at all what you've asked about, https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/atheroswds probably makes more sense (but it requires OpenWrt on both ends of the wireless connection, and the RPi's brcmfmac wireless can't do 4addr either).
Thanks, I will talke a look at what os recommended. As for thw Nighthawk it is a D7000, and I did see some reference to wifi issues with Nighthawks, so for the time being I decided to leave it be for the moment.
This was the guide I followed, with the exception of leaving the address the OpenWRT RPi from the mobile wifi hotspot as dynamic, as I don't have much control over the wifi network the phone hosts. While it works to an extent it isn't great.
Would I be better off connecting the OpenWRT RPi to the LAN side of the Nighthawk and setting it up as a internet gateway? As I said still learning terminology and best practice with networks!
That is very nearly what I'm after. The only issue is it uses the Wifi on the RPi to connect to the hotspot, and so I assume it can't host a network at the same time. Would it be effective to (ditching the nighthawk) put a second wifi adaptor in a spare USB socket and host a network on that, and connect a dumb switch to the RPi ethernet socket, or is that asking too much of the RPi 3b+?
Aside from any specific wifi isues related to the nighthawk, the idea woudl be that you could have a wireless uplink to your phone (treated as a wan), and then you would be able to have a lan for both wired and wireless devices. On most standard all-in-one routers, this is possible to do (i.e. wifi client (sta) mode + wifi AP mode simultaneously).
The Pi does not support simultanous mode operation, and even not withstanding that, the wifi on the Pi is really low end and poor performance.
If the Nighthawk can't do what you want on its own due to wifi issues, you can set that device as a dumb AP and then just use the Pi for the wireless uplink + routed lan (via the ethernet port > lan port of the night hawk).
Alternatively, you could consider USB tethering if it is an option for your phone... then you eliminate the need to do a wireless uplink/wan connection.