A few weeks ago, I upgraded my Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH home router to OpenWRT 10.03.1-rc5. I followed the same upgrade process as I used to upgrade to previous releases. However, this time most settings were not restored correctly.
Note: The 10.03.1 “Release Candidate” series aren’t true RCs. They are reasonably stable snapshots of current development, rather than iterations of bug fixes of the same stable code base. rc5 includes a new Luci web interface and newer kernel and hardware drivers since rc4. This makes experimenting with these releases that much more exciting.
What went wrong:
- The LAN IP address changed to the default, 192.168.1.1/24. The Luci interface showed the DHCP server disabled, although it gave me an address (from the new range) when I connected. It stopped doing so after I changed the interface IP, which means the “no DHCP” setting took effect when I hit Apply.
- A number of other settings reset to defaults: hostname, domain name, all DNS and DHCP options, remote syslog server IP, LED configuration, and wifi settings.
What went right:
- It is no longer necessary to install the kmod-ath9k and wpad-mini drivers after installation. Wifi just works without additional packages.
- My custom firewall configuration survived, as did my .profile for root.
- The new Luci interface really is better than the old one.
- Multiple wireless networks with different encryption settings now works. I can again have a hidden WEP network for my Nintendo DS.
After the upgrade, I followed the steps in my original post and reconfigured the lost settings. Since my BackupPC server takes regular backups of /overlay, it was trivial to restore most of what was lost from /etc/config. That was especially useful for my OpenVPN configuration.
The problems began when I tried to enable wifi. I found that it was stable in 802.11b-only mode, but when I tried to use “auto”, “b+g”, or “g+n” mode, both of my laptops repeatedly lost their connections. I tried many combinations of options before giving up and using another AP (as I have done since a week after buying this router). I have hope that this will one day be unnecessary.
Tags: openwrt
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