Hi
I'm having trouble getting the WAN port to work on my 1043ND (V1.8). I can see that during powerup a UDP packet is sent out the WAN port with some text indicating that I should press the button to enter failsafe, so I can see that the port does actually work at least a little bit.
I have searched and found this issue is not new.
http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr1043nd
Now, as per that link, I have gone through the process of downgrading the bootloader by installing the stock German firmware (after installing regular TP-Link firmware). During this process I can see the MAC addresses for the LAN and WAN differ (by one), but after installing OpenWRT (backfire or trunk) over the German stick firmware, the WAN MAC address seems to have changed back to the LAN address, and the port seems to be disabled again.
If I use the command "grep -a U-Boot /dev/mtd0ro | cut -d'I' -f1", I can see that the bootloader version is now:
U-Boot 1.1.4 (Nov 17 2009 - 11:56:26)
To test the WAN interface, I give it a static IP and try and ping a second device connected directly into the WAN port on the same network. This device allows me to see any and all network traffic on the port. Nothing seems to come out of the WAN port on the OpenWRT box (apart from that UDP packet during powerup). A ping of the OpenWRT address from the connected device also fails. The LEDs on the boxes indicate that there is a cable plugged in.
So I guess what I would like to know is:
After downgrading the bootloader and reinstalling OpenWRT, should I expect the LAN and WAN interfaces to have different MAC addresses like I see when using stock firmware?
Is it OK to install any version of OpenWRT (backfire/trunk, whatever), or do I need to install a particular build for the WAN port to work?
Is there something else that I need to do? The information I've found on this bug so far seems to indicate that downgrading the bootloader should be all that is required.
Thanks in advance.