Good to hear someone has an EA3500 running well. As for driver issue, I was basing that off threads describing the limited support available in OpenWRT for Marvell chipsets, but maybe I am not on the up-and-up. https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/linksys/ea4500
Basically, I interpreted it as don't expect too much as there have always been problems with getting wireless to work with Marvell. Maybe I am missing something here, that was just my understanding based on googling through DD-WRT/OpenWRT/LEDE support and problems for EA4500 / EA4200 / EA3500.
My EA4500 runs warm as well, I experience a ton of disconnects on android devices, and to a lesser degree iOS. Laptop was running more or less okay, but page load time were very slow compared to my older 2.4ghz router (DIR 615 running DD-WRT). Wifi just cuts in an out. Also per my last post, if I don't do a hard reboot (and sometimes hard reboot but with only 30s-1min powered off) when reboot it will not properly boot. Lights on, but no WAN, and inaccessible via LAN.
@adrinux I will back up my settings and try flashing a factory image and restoring my settings rather than the sysupgrade. Though I had read that some folks were having trouble flashing LEDE directly from Cisco firmware for the EA4500, and had to flash an older OpenWRT then sysupgrade.
Oh also, would you mind elaborating on changing "option disassoc_low_awk" to higher values? After I try a fresh flash and some testing would still like to consider trying that out.
@Art There's no LuCI ui to tweak the wireless as described in those settings. The thread above suggests wpa_group_rekey rather than option disassoc_low_awk so I used that:
ssh into the router as root
cd /etc/config
vim wireless
under "config wifi-iface 'default_radio0'" and "config wifi-iface 'default_radio1'" sections I have option wpa_group_rekey '10800'
save and exit, then probably restart the router.
It might well be a poor driver, the hardware and driver work together of course. But for the most part my issues with the ea4500 seem to be due to stressing it – it's a 120 yr old house with a brick wall through the middle and 50cm think external walls stone with rubble infill, the problem area is a more modern extension outside of that. That's where I get dropouts, hard work for most wireless routers. I don't even know if my problem is the same as yours.
As I said, it got really bad a couple of months ago, could barely maintain a connection for more than a couple of minutes in that part of the house, though it was ok next to the router. So I set up the wr1043nd as a wireless extender and that solved the problem. Which leaves me with the problem I've always had of the connection dropping after an hour or two when watching movies in that part of the house.
@ximibaba & @adrinux belated thanks for your replies and assistance!
It has been a while since I had a chance to troubleshoot this device, but I finally had some time and thought I would post my results for any future viewers.
Per the problem of 2.4ghz wireless:
I did a flash back to OEM firmware and a fresh re-install. This certainly improved performance, I didn't have any devices plain disconnecting constantly.
That said, re-buffering and slow performance was still an issue. My ancient DIR-615 definitely outperforms the EA4500. @adrinux I tried you wpa_group_rekey option and after a week of testing have seen no real noticeable difference in performance, but maybe I should try taking a look at graphs while streaming something longer.
Overall to me, it certainly seems like the general lackluster performance could be either a poor drive performance issue OR the overheating.
Related to overheat, on the issue of not being able to reboot properly:
I confirmed this was heat related. SSH/GUI attempts at reboot, and scheduled reboot in middle of night via cron all ran into problems. When I have a mini-USB fan running on it there are no issues with reboot and the device freezing/becoming unresponsive.
While I am tempted to go back to my DIR-615, due to OpenWRT/LEDE's more updated security patching I think I will just stick with the EA4500 until I procure a reasonable alternative. It is certainly still usable.
For anyone interested, I was using LEDE Reboot 17.01.4 r3560-79f57e422d on EA4500v1.
Nice work with the fan! Is it plugged into the usb socket on the router?
I haven't had as many problems recently. Even with watching long video. Still get the occasional fall-over of the ea4500 though. Seems to happen more often streaming from my plex server compared to netflix. I assume because its shifting a lot more data from plex. It's livable though.
I also can't really decide what to replace it with anyway (apart from something very expensive that looks ugly).
@adriunx yup, the fan is just plugged into the USB port for the router. It certainly limits other more interesting options for the USB slot and seems like it is a waste of electricity just to keep a router with a poorly designed heat sink running decently, but oh well.
If you are looking for an upgrade, I've read good things about the Archer C7 or Archer C2600. They have a lot of LEDE/OpenWRT community support, and the C2600 runs one of the best performing/supported chipsets.
As of the aesthetics, can't help you there haha. Personally, I am just glad tech design has generally moved beyond Alienware style flashing LEDs.