I'm considering picking up a WAX202 as an access point. The stock firmware seems to only allow VLAN when in router mode, not AP.
My other network router which is managing things, is an old Linksys E3200 with FreshTomato giving it multiWAN (and VLAN) ability. Since it only has 802.11a/b/g/n (although 5Ghz shows active in the firmware, doesn't seem to be available), I need to connect the WAX202 via a trunk VLAN. One of the ports will have an incoming WAN and another will connect a PC to the Linksys.
Is the WAX202 capable of that with OpenWRT? I can't find any discussion of how VLAN works with it.
VLAN support is easy in OpenWrt. There are two different methods of how the VLAN syntax works, depending if your device is using swconfig / individually routed ports, or if you've got a device that has migrated to DSA. However, it's easy and supported well with OpenWrt on the vast majority of hardware.
The reason why I said I can't find any discussion is because OpenWRT's support page for it has a question mark for VLAN support.
Edit: I gotta admit, my skill set with this sort of thing is low. It was my understanding that OpenWRT has a GUI, but the more forum discussions I read, the more that it sounds like it doesn't... or isn't very useful via the GUI anyway.
(It might help if you ask a specific question about how to config - if that's your issue.)
The Wiki is community-maintained. The question mark (I haven't seen it - since I asked in the thread linked) is likely due to the need to re-word the page for DSA versus swconfig devices.
If you mean VLANs - I actually find it quite easy via the web GUI. I've never really attempted to setup a switch via the command line. I'm not sure where you found that information (perhaps from someone who preferred using the CLI anyways).
Thanks. I was worried because most discussions in the forum here seem to be over my head.
I've tried custom firmwares on my old Linksys.
dd-wrt is a pain, but workable but doesn't support the 5ghz.
FreshTomato has been delightful on my old Linksys router and both antenna are active. It's a keeper.
OpenWRT has sounded more complicated, and I haven't tested it on the Linksys since it doesn't support either wifi band.
I'm seriously hesitant to flash the firmware on a new device at $50, but there aren't a lot of Wifi 6 options that support VLAN (at a reasonable price). The only other option is to add a managed switch, which I thought I could avoid.
Define reasonable price? Consumer devices (with the vendor firmware) typically don't have VLAN support. But, enterprise devices do, and some are not terribly expensive. The U6-Lite, for example, is $99. Of course, nearly all devices supported by OpenWrt can support VLANs, too, so it should be possible to get Wifi 6 consumer grade devices for a bit less and have the VLAN support that you want.
Regarding OpenWrt -- IMO it is actually easier to use than DD-WRT, although as you get to more complex configurations, it becomes less about the ease of use of the firmware/UI, and more about understanding the core concepts (it took me a while to really learn how to use VLANs properly, but once I did, applying that knowledge across different firmware and vendor implementations was pretty easy). But once you learn them, it becomes fairly straight forward.
I'm just saying, a wifi 6 router (or access point) that ALSO supports VLAN (out of the box) is probably more expensive than a consumer router with a managed switch.