Anyone had problems with a wrt54 running dd-wrt?

Help setting up WiFi
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NQ4T
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Joined: Mon Aug 06, 2018 11:48 pm

Anyone had problems with a wrt54 running dd-wrt?

Post by NQ4T »

Hi all,

A few weeks ago I moved my hotspots from inside the house to the shack because the people I live with thought it was a good idea to always unplug them as "they found the lights annoying". Of course...I have no wifi in my shack so I was using the wifi in my PC to make a "mobile hotspot" for the purposes of getting them online.

The other night I took an old wrt54g that was collecting dust and threw dd-wrt on it. I figured since the hotspots don't need super fast wireless-n, this would do the job. It for the most part has....one ONE of them. My Zumspot setup configured for DMR works fine.

The Jumbospot I have for D-Star....well....apparently, the wifi isn't happy anymore. I started noticing after about 5 minutes that DStar conversations were dropping packets and the reflector kept reconnecting; then at some point it wouldn't reconnect. I tried a different reflector thinking that particular one was having issues...but it still wouldn't link.

Jumping on to the dashboard told me something was wrong....or rather the inability to connect to the dashboard. I had to make 10 attempts before it would load. System load on the configuration was about 1.9 across the board. I tried getting in to SSH, took several tries. Finally log in, try to load top; took 3 minutes for it to appear on the command line to run it.

ACtual CPU usage was at maybe 10%; however, the software interrupts were sky-high. I saw several kworker threads related to the wifi driver.

I'll admit I haven't ruled out a problem with the SDCard. It seems strange that one would work fine with the AP and the other would fail. I will report on my findings after I get another card flashed and swap Pi0Ws around a few more times. But has anyone ever encountered a problem with the RPi just refusing to work on a specific access point? It seemed weird that the Broadcom driver (from what I could tell) would be causing problems since the wrt54g is also broadcom.
NQ4T
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Re: Anyone had problems with a wrt54 running dd-wrt?

Post by NQ4T »

Apparently I'm not even sure what I'm doing these days.

I went to stick my Pi-Star 3 SD card back in the hotspot I use for D-Star to see if that did any good. It's loaded and works just fine. During this time I went looking for the Pi-Star 3 microSD for the hotspot I use for DMR and found it in the DMR hotspot. The entire time the DMR hotspot that wasn't giving me problems was running 3 instead of 4. I remember flashing a card for Pi-Star 4 to test WIRES-X passthrough to figure out what XLX-YSF did; and I seem to remember I did it on the spot I used for DMR first. I just don't remember putting the Pi-Star 3 card back in the DMR hotspot. So not only do I have a microSD card lost somewhere around here....but my initial troubleshooting was wrong.
AF6VN
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Re: Anyone had problems with a wrt54 running dd-wrt?

Post by AF6VN »

Silly question maybe...

Did you configure the hotspots with UNIQUE hostnames?

If both are running with the default "pi-star" hostname, you could be confusing the router.

--
AF6VN
Dennis L Bieber
NQ4T
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Re: Anyone had problems with a wrt54 running dd-wrt?

Post by NQ4T »

Well dd-wrt on the wrt54g is literally running as just an AP; my router is still the same ISP supplied router and in cases where I've had the hotspots use the same hostname (like when nuking the microsd and reinstalling fresh)...the router doesn't care if I'm accessing by IP. Both MAC addresses of the Pi's are given static assignments in the routers DHCP...one is .10 and the other is .11. In fact, because of the fact I set static assignments in the router with a hostname...the router completely ignores whatever hostname the hotspots issue. They could both have a hostname of pi-star and my router would instead treat them as pi-star and pi-dstar since that's in it's DHCP assignment.

But both of them were in fact set to the proper hostnames.

The problem seems to be directly related to some incompatibility with the wrt54g. Both hotspots running Pi-Star 4 operate just fine when they're connected to the laptop's wifi hotspot or the stupidly weak wifi from the house. It is only on Pi-Star 4 when I ask them to connect to the wrt54g that things turn nasty.

Some of the RaspbianPi forums I've been reading have spoken about some issues with Broadcom stuff. I haven't cared enough to dig in to it yet as I just stuck the Pi-Star3 cards back in. The only thing 4 offers me right now is working WIRES-X passthrough for things like DMR bridges or when connected to an XLX's YSF master. Since I have a DMR radio now and I don't even use Fusion with my hotspot...I'll stick with this while I try to investigate just what the fixes are. Most said updating the distribution and installing the new Broadcom firmware would fix it; but it did not.
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MW0MWZ
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Re: Anyone had problems with a wrt54 running dd-wrt?

Post by MW0MWZ »

Raspbian have pushed some recent updates that might fix this - give it another shot :)
Andy

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NQ4T
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Re: Anyone had problems with a wrt54 running dd-wrt?

Post by NQ4T »

Hi Andy,

I've been meaning to. I've had a number of other IT related ham projects I was working on for both my own usage and helping someone else try to diagnose something. Got pushed to the side since it's not something I think about despite the fact they're always running and always being used.

*edit: I had originally updated the base OS which seemed to install some new Broadcom firmware but it still had issues. I'll flash a new card here in a bit and see if there have been additional updates since.*
NQ4T
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Re: Anyone had problems with a wrt54 running dd-wrt?

Post by NQ4T »

MW0MWZ wrote: Thu May 21, 2020 8:00 pm Raspbian have pushed some recent updates that might fix this - give it another shot :)
4.1.2 is no better. I get the dashboard loaded for config with load levels reading .9/1.14/.44

I cannot make an SSH connection. It has locked up after taking password. The dashboard isn't responding.

It just disappeared from the network again.

I'm gonna have to stick with 3 until Rasbian fixes this issue or I get a new wifi AP. You cannot use Pi-Star 4 with a wrt54g revision 8 at all.

This is actually worse. 4.1.1 would let me make connections. This just drops from the network after a minute.


I have just noticed while my load averages are somewhat high with 3.4.17; it's not unresponsive. So while I was seeing high load averages and thinking there was a problem...load averages here are high as well. But it remains responsive and doesn't disappear from the network.
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