Hello,
It's a bit of a novel, but TL;DR I have rather been forced to give up my use of OpenWRT as the sole network appliances, forced a hard reset, and now I can't even get LUcI to load IMMEDIATELY after a flash.
Several weeks ago, I had my EA8300 essentially forget how to route.
It should be noted that I'm not a networking expert, my IT brain is more useful with point-of-use problems & troubleshooting. I'm not the best with SSH, and only use the command line in windows or linux when I'm good and stuck- consequently I rely heavily on LuCI. I've been carrying static IP's for years, so (although I leave DHCP on) I have static addresses for my towers, network drives etc..
Prior to this June, my router had almost a year of continuous trouble-free uptime. I don't know what caused the problem, but I hadn't changed anything or unduly stressed the network, but I found myself needing to reboot the router every morning at the start of work. What was truly odd was that my WRT-1200AC started flaking out at the same time, even though it had just been relegated to switching and AP functionality.
In order to try to salvage things, I went ahead and re-flashed both of them, and did a settings restore from 12 months prior. Both routers lost connectivity and had to be hard-reset after the settings import (and I tried trimming the settings down to JUST the DHCP file, to save myself re-entering all those static IP's).
Having lost enough productive time, and recognizing my lack of knowledge, I just said screw it and bought the mesh system I'd been considering for a year. Now there are a number of things I used OpenWRT for (network file sharing, FreeDNS IP updates, etc) that I want to keep using it for- it's got decent RAM & power for those things, so although I'd flashed it back to Factory (Linksys OS) in the process of TRYING to use it, I've flashed back to OpenWRT (and done a hard-reset, which restores Factory OS) like 3 times now, because after a few settings changes, it stops responding to anything besides PING.
Yes, my backup moves the router to the 192.168.2.x subnet, and turns off DHCP, but I've changed my computer's self assigned IP every time it should have been changed to fit the router....
I've never had an open source router utterly refuse to cooperate, so I'm sure I'm missing something. The last installation (2 days ago) of OpenWRT 'remembered' a password that wasn't the default [None] and wasn't the go-to password that I use (and I use a password vault, so the odds of the password being miskeyed repeatedly are almost nil)
Yesterday the router was running & responding in the Linksys OS @ 192.168.1.1, I installed the '-factory' image, and now the only way I can tell it's on are the LED's, evidence that DHCP worked, and a ping response at 192.168.1.1...
I'd love to have this silly thing running with my settings from Oct 2021, but I've either been unable to get to the Restore page (now), or I have yet to have success with that (previous attempts), or to even successfully move the WRT-1200AC to the 192.168.2.x subnet (multiple other previous attempts)
Thoughts?