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Router redux

I had just a little bit of downtime over the last few weeks while Angeline and I reacquainted ourselves with how to take care of an infant. It’s like riding a bicycle: there are tons of things you forgot since last time.

One of the long-on-my-todo-list items finally got completed: I upgraded all of my wifi routers. I have 5: an old dual band 11n router and four TP-Link 11ac units, all of which were running some oldish build of OpenWRT.

I decided the 11n router’s time has come for the trash-heap, so I put the latest stable LEDE build on one of the TP-Links and swapped it out.

The other three are just access points without the router: they just have all the ports on the unit bridged together, connected to the router via a wired switch. I also have a mesh wifi interface up on each unit so that I could place the unit anywhere regardless of wired connectivity (though, in practice, I have wired drops everywhere so I don’t really use this.) For these, I build from source with just the required bits. I added a serial port to one of the units so I can test builds there before rolling out to the other two.

In all it was pretty painless since the LEDE build is more or less the same as OpenWRT. I did go through (LEDE) recovery once and found this fun issue:

root@(none):/tmp# sysupgrade -n lede-ar71xx-generic-archer-c7-v2-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin
Image metadata not found
killall: watchdog: no process killed
Commencing upgrade. All shell sessions will be closed now.
Failed to connect to ubus
root@(none):/tmp#

…because sysupgrade has different paths for failsafe vs not; and for some reason $FAILSAFE is not always set. Do this to work-around:

root@(none):/tmp# export FAILSAFE=1
root@(none):/tmp# sysupgrade -n lede-ar71xx-generic-archer-c7-v2-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin
Image metadata not found
killall: watchdog: no process killed
Commencing upgrade. All shell sessions will be closed now.
root@(none):/tmp# Connection to 192.168.1.1 closed by remote host.

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++router

As a sometime wireless hacker, it’s a bit embarrassing to admit that I’ve had the factory firmware on my wifi router all this time, but when I first tried OpenWrt on it, ath9k was only a few months old and dropped connections all the time. Thus, I made do with the factory install but ran many of the essential services (dns, dhcp, tftp, etc) from my Linux workstation. And life continued apace.

After a recent network upgrade, I found I could no longer make my router understand ipv6, and so it was time to put the original firmware to pasture. In the intervening years, ath9k grew up, so I took another try with OpenWrt. The install took about 20 minutes, most of which was configuring the firewall and copying my existing dnsmasq config into a uci-friendly format. Everything works great and my ipv6 is back. Nice job, all involved!

I suppose I could now eat even more dogfood by running a mesh interface on one of the radios. In the past, I’ve tinkered with mesh as a wireless distribution system, but I don’t have much of a use for that currently with every room in the new place being wired. Perhaps my backyard could use expanded coverage?