OpenWrt Forum Archive

Topic: Linksys WRT1200AC v2 / WRT1900ACS v2 support

The content of this topic has been archived between 19 Apr 2018 and 3 May 2018. There are no obvious gaps in this topic, but there may still be some posts missing at the end.

starcms wrote:
dizturbedxmind wrote:

Sera,

Thanks for the response. I tried flashing the image from Kaloz you linked in your first post (openwrt-mvebu-armada-385-linksys-caiman-squashfs-factory.img) and it seemed to soft-brick the router. Fortunately I was able to recover by toggling the power switch 4 time, waiting for the lights to come on each time. I ended up reflashing the CC image and updating the mwlwifi driver per the OpenWRT wiki, and (fingers crossed), everything seems to be ok for now. Should the issue recur, I will delve further into it. As the old addage goes "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

The link in your last post isn't working sad

I'd highly recommend @david502's builds. They have the latest wifi driver, are based on LEDE (which branched from Open-WRT about 6 months ago and has had alot more progress made -- it looks and works just like Open-WRT). There's a link in the wiki, but here it is for you (link taken out). It includes most if not all of the packages you'll need (fully featured) and regularly updated (once a week).

I'd recommend flashing back to the stock Linksys firmware, then flashing @david's build.

Some info on LEDE can be found at (link taken out), but if you didn't know, you'd think a LEDE build was Open-WRT.  Most, if not all, the devs who make firmware for the WRT series now base it on LEDE.

Edit: And for the fastest speeds and best reliability, you should always and only use WPA2 PSK with CCMP (AES)

Starcms, thank you for the suggestion. The issue unfortunately is coming back again, so I need to do something, and I dont know if my skills are quite up to Sera's suggestion of building my own branch.

starcms wrote:
dizturbedxmind wrote:

Sera,

Thanks for the response. I tried flashing the image from Kaloz you linked in your first post (openwrt-mvebu-armada-385-linksys-caiman-squashfs-factory.img) and it seemed to soft-brick the router. Fortunately I was able to recover by toggling the power switch 4 time, waiting for the lights to come on each time. I ended up reflashing the CC image and updating the mwlwifi driver per the OpenWRT wiki, and (fingers crossed), everything seems to be ok for now. Should the issue recur, I will delve further into it. As the old addage goes "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

The link in your last post isn't working sad

I'd highly recommend @david502's builds. They have the latest wifi driver, are based on LEDE (which branched from Open-WRT about 6 months ago and has had alot more progress made -- it looks and works just like Open-WRT). There's a link in the wiki, but here it is for you http://davidc502sis.dynamic-dns.net/index.shtml  It includes most if not all of the packages you'll need (fully featured) and regularly updated (once a week).

As a reply to "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." you recommend Lede, what irony.

starcms wrote:

I'd recommend flashing back to the stock Linksys firmware, then flashing @david's build.

Some info on LEDE can be found at https://lede-project.org/, but if you didn't know, you'd think a LEDE build was Open-WRT.  Most, if not all, the devs who make firmware for the WRT series now base it on LEDE.

Except that the maintainer of this device family stayed with Openwrt. I use Openwrt as a basis for my work as well for that matter.

starcms wrote:

Edit: And for the fastest speeds and best reliability, you should always and only use WPA2 PSK with CCMP (AES)

I use EAP for added maintainability and security. There is no performance penalty.

dizturbedxmind,

The link works fine for me, was probably a temporary failure.

As for building from source, I understand that it may be daunting at first but that's were Openwrt starts to truly shine. Get familiar with it and you will wonder how you ever preferred prebuilt images.

sera,

The link still isn't working for me, "This site can’t be reached / gpldr.in’s server DNS address could not be found." is the message I get.

I've not heard of LEDE before starcms' suggestion - are there issues with it?

And do you know of any good howtos/tutorials on building from source that you'd recommend?

Ha, dig says there is only an ipv4 address for gpldr.in. Do you have an ipv6 only setup?

About issues with Lede, there obviously are, but the same can be said of Openwrt. CC with up to date mwlwifi works very well for me, at least it did the last time I tested.

https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/buildroot.exigence might be a good starting point for building your own firmware.

Sera,

No my network is IPv4 only at the moment. I recently replaced my aging 2821ISR with an Untangle installation running on a C2D E7400 with 8GB of RAM and haven't gotten around to IPv6 configuration on it yet.

Thanks for the heads up on the tutorial I'll give it a shot later.

Sera,

Forgive the multitude of questions, as stated previously I'm new to the building aspect of this. I've set up everything per the article you suggested, up to the git cloning of the openwrt package. From there I'm not sure what packages to select looking at make menuconfig.

Additionally, how do I ensure I have the latest mwlwifi driver during this build?

(Last edited by dizturbedxmind on 4 Jan 2017, 06:07)

dizturbedxmind,

the only option that is changed from the defaults for releases is selecting luci, the web interface. No other changes are made. If you installed additional packages through the web interface you may want to select those as well. Don't worry, it will probably take a couple rounds of trial and error anyway to get the feel how things fit together.

If you build from up to date sources you always get the latest which OpenWrt offers. Sometimes there is a more recent driver upstream, in which case you can just change the version number in the Makefile but that's for another time and isn't needed here.

PS: Well, your ipv4 setup doesn't seem to work properly either wink  Resolves to 212.47.226.249 for me.

(Last edited by sera on 4 Jan 2017, 10:39)

sera wrote:

So, did build something that might work. Latest mwlwifi built for the 15.05.1 release, untested:

kmod-mwlwifi_3.18.23+10.3.2.0-20161222-1_mvebu.ipk:
sha256sum: 520cb7e307e0fd0910dc8371b955692e59d8e298ce74074a96c3872fbd7be2de

Hi sera, I have just tested your ipk but it cannot be installed. OpenWRT complaint about malformed package file.

Anyway, how could you build this package? When I tried to do myself the mwlwifi had a lot of unrecognice variables on source code that OpenWRT didn't recognize, for this reason I supposed that we cannot build the ipk from the latest wifi drivers for 15.05.1

Regards

(Last edited by seur18 on 4 Jan 2017, 11:32)

sera wrote:

PS: Well, your ipv4 setup doesn't seem to work properly either wink  Resolves to 212.47.226.249 for me.

My DNS servers are Google's (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) with the exception of a few forwarded zones hosted by a local BIND server for AD and other local services. Good news is, it worked this morning - at least for the download. Now to figure out how to manually install an IPK smile

seur18,

Ideally you'd just grab the SDK and run "./scripts/feeds update && make defconfig && make", though that doesn't work as compat-wireless can't be built in this context as-is. So hacks will be required in some places, once I figure out how to do it properly I definitely share how to do it instead of providing binaries wink Either way, will take me more than a couple minutes, so may take a while before I get there. Remember NemoAlex decided it to be to much pain.

sera wrote:

Ha, dig says there is only an ipv4 address for gpldr.in. Do you have an ipv6 only setup?

About issues with Lede, there obviously are, but the same can be said of Openwrt. CC with up to date mwlwifi works very well for me, at least it did the last time I tested.

https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/buildroot.exigence might be a good starting point for building your own firmware.

So, I set up a virtual machine on my proxmox host running Xubuntu 16.04.1, and followed the instructions listed. Everything appeared to build successfully, but when I load the image onto my router it soft-bricks like the Kaloz image did sad Is there any way to simply compile the mwlwifi driver and install that?

sera,
thanks for your help, and yes I know I was one that usually install the Nemoalex ipk , for this reason then I tried to it myselft but without luck.

dizturbedxmind,
the process to build only the mwlwifi driver it's what sera and me are talking about. It's not easy to build the driver for an old kernel version because you must to change the source code to make it compatible. Maybe the softbrick that you said is like when I installed the kaloz image in my WRT1900ACSv2. In my case the issue was that the switch has a bug, the port 6 disappear, for this reason if you have set up a vlan on the lan side you cannot reach the router until you reset it

seur18,

just checked and indeed by default there is no switch setup in CC, so if you changed it you need to reset the vlan configuration before flashing a new CC based image, just like you have to when switching back to OEM firmware [1] or the unexpected might happen. This is true for all models except the original WRT1900AC (Mamba). Alternatively customs files [2] can be used to setup the switch as desired right from the start.

[1] https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/linksys/wr … penwrt_oem
[2] https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/build#custom_files

sera wrote:

seur18,

just checked and indeed by default there is no switch setup in CC, so if you changed it you need to reset the vlan configuration before flashing a new CC based image, just like you have to when switching back to OEM firmware [1] or the unexpected might happen. This is true for all models except the original WRT1900AC (Mamba). Alternatively customs files [2] can be used to setup the switch as desired right from the start.

[1] https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/linksys/wr … penwrt_oem
[2] https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/build#custom_files

That could be my issue. I did a lazy flash, I did not reset prior to flashing (though I did tell it NOT to keep the configuration). Tonight I'll try resetting first and then uploading - would you recommend a build I've done or the Kaloz image for Caiman?

dizturbedxmind,

use your own image, assuming you built the CC branch is almost the same except for an additional kernel bump for security reasons. If you already customized it is even closer to what you want.

The stable branch only gets security and other important bugfixes, so if CC offers what you need that is the low maintenance variant. The development branch (DD / master) also gets an ever changing feature and bug set on top.

The releases as well as Kaloz build are like what you built for yourself just with what code was current back then.

sera wrote:

seur18,

just checked and indeed by default there is no switch setup in CC, so if you changed it you need to reset the vlan configuration before flashing a new CC based image, just like you have to when switching back to OEM firmware [1] or the unexpected might happen. This is true for all models except the original WRT1900AC (Mamba). Alternatively customs files [2] can be used to setup the switch as desired right from the start.

Umm ... I'm don't understand that... so I buy a new device with oem firmware and i don't change anything. Then I install CC and change the switch vlan in the wan and lan side with the network config file. After that I want to install another CC image (or DD), in this moment, May I reset vlan configuration at this point prior to the new install?

I have test it and when I install a new image I haven't connectivity, after that I reset the router and then I try to make the same changes in the network config file to set vlan  but with newers images you cannot set sw.port number six. I think here is the issue because this port is missing and the old network config file has some config apply at this port

Regards.

seur18,

if the target image expects the switch to be configured with factory defaults, you need to reset before flashing. This is true for OEM and CC images. If you flash DD and my hunch is right you shouldn't have that issue as DD configures the switch to match the network configuration.

You can try https://gist.github.com/anonymous/6e396 … 6fbd052412 on top of CC.

sera, with the new ipk CC 15.05.1 complaint again about malformed package file. I don't know why I cannot install it.

Best regards.

seur18,

This time I used the SDK as intended or so I thought, the first time was clearly an abuse. Guess will have to setup a test environment myself, will see where to fit it in. The backport is available as a patch so if someone else wants to try, be my guest, you might well beat me to the punch.

If you could test if the swconfig / vlan patch fixes your issue it could be upstream as a bug fix, currently it's closer to a feature change which wouldn't belong into the stable branch.

Hi sera,

I want to try the switch patch but as the router is my only internet door I'm a little worried about to lost it, jeje. Anyway, How can I test it? witch image I have to download to test it?

Regards.

Hi seur18,

There is no prebuilt image for the switch patch, the patch is meant to be applied ontop of CC and then used to build an image yourself.

As for your worries, get yourself an usb2ttl cable and try to understand the recovery methods listed on the wiki. Basically if you know how to recover from a completely trashed flash there is no need to worry ever again. Not that it would be easy to trash it in the first place.

@sera, sorry for the delayed response - work has been hectic. I finally took the time to sit down and build the image, and got it uploaded - yet i'm still having the same difficulties. I've spoken with some colleagues and I've decided I'm throwing in the towel on this setup. Just ordered a Ubiquiti access point lol

dizturbedxmind,

As long as I can't reproduce it's hard to try figuring out what exactly goes wrong. Ubiquiti access point might indeed be the least painful solution.

Anyway mind posting your switch configuration so I can have another look at it?