I'm playing around with OpenWrt and followed this tutorial step by step to set up a mesh network: http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/mesh.80211s

Problem:
When I got to the end and ran these two commands:

iw dev $MESH_IFACE station dump
iw dev $MESH_IFACE mpath dump

Station dump gave the expected output, but no paths showed up for mpath dump. Furthermore, I can't send pings between the routers either.

What I tried/Questions:
I thought maybe the wlan0 interface (described in the tutorial) was rejecting it on the firewall, but it isn't. There is a mesh0 interface described in the tutorial as well. Is that supposed to have its own set of firewall rules to allow it to send traffic, or is there something else that I need to configure to get them to communicate with a ping?

The other thing that is really confusing me conceptually is:
If the routers can see who is on the mesh (station dump), shouldn't they be able to "talk" to each other?

I'd appreciate any help or advice in the right direction. I am pretty new to this and I am not sure exactly what to look for.
I don't know if this will help, but I am using Chaos Calmer with all the default setting besides changing IPs and what was required in the mesh tutorial.

I think that mpath dump works at layer 2, you don't need any IP (layer 3) routing ability to make it work.  But I'm not sure of that.

You should start simple: set the two routers to static IPs in the same subnet, and turn off DHCP on one of them.  This is the same as if you were going to interconnect them by ethernet cable and use one as a primary router and one as a 'dumb AP'.  Then create the mesh interfaces by editing /etc/config/wireless (LUCI is not able to set up a mesh) and put them in the existing lan networks.  You should then find the two routers can ping each other as if they were interconnected with a cable.

(Last edited by mk24 on 19 Jul 2015, 20:58)

Okay, so I can ping back and forth with an ethernet cable between. I still can't do so without the ethernet cable. When I run the ping command, I get a report saying that all the packets were dropped. However, since I can ping with the ethernet cable, I know that I am doing something right in terms of setting up the mesh interfaces on each router.

As far as other solutions:

I didn't want to set up static routes because that seemed like it would defeat the purpose of the mesh. For example, if I have a mesh an one radio goes down, it should route the data to another node in the mesh. If I set a static route, when the node goes down, the mesh won't heal itself properly.

The firewall for the lan is accepting all traffic. Ah, but wait. I am thinking "out loud" a bit. Do I need to create a separate set of firewall rules for the "mesh" interface? I assumed that the mesh interface was part of the lan so I didn't need to add a new set of rules because it would inherit the lan rules. Does that sound right, or am I getting that wrong?