Re: Testing WR841 firmware

[T Gillett]

Hi Karl

Interesting. 

The trigger for this was possibly the DHCP lease on the PC expiring and failing to renew.

Cycling the wifi on the phone likely did not cause a lease renewal as its lease was still current.

So you have a Linux Mint PC trying to get a DHCP renewal from the DHCP server on the gateway node, via the satellite node and across the batman-adv mesh.

What is interesting is that cycling the satellite node seems to have fixed the issue.

But I wonder if rebooting the PC might have had the same effect (ie not just cycling its network port on and off, but restarting all networking on the PC)

If you want to test whether DHCP is the underlying issue, you could try setting the DHCP lease to a much shorter value than the 7200 second default value so that it renews, say, every five minutes, then run the movie and see what happens.

It might also be interesting to watch the RAM memory usage on the various nodes during heavy network usage. The 32MB RAM on the WR841 may be getting pushed pretty hard during heavy streaming on the network. 

Note that the SECN firmware is just a bunch of shell scripts that set up the configuration of OpenWrt, Batman-adv and the various other packages. It does nothing at run time except run a script every ten seconds to update the status page data. 

So you need to look at the behaviour of the underlying software components for these sorts of run time issues.

Regards

Terry

On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 2:59 AM, Karl Wagner <karl....@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Terry,

Something weird happened last  night. I currently have 3 APs with this firmware.  On one of the nodes, which is not an Internet gateway (nothing on WAN port)  I have a PC connected to it on the LAN port, and it has been working fine. It gives me DHCP address from the main gateway AP, as it should.

But last night I was doing some heavy traffic, actually watching a movie via popcorntime :) and all of a sudden I lost IP address!!!!

However, my cell phone was connected to the WiFi of the same AP and it was working fine. I disabled and enabled wifi on the phone and it got IP again and I could browse fine.

But on my computer connected to LAN port of this AP, I never got IP again, even after enabling/disabling the port several times (BTW, I'm on Linux Mint) and even pulling the cable and re-pluging it.

I had to power down the node and turn it back on and then it started working.

Not sure what happened.

-Karl

On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 8:53 PM, Karl Wagner <karl....@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Terry,

I'll see if I can run some tests during the week.

BTW, have you seen this?  https://www.tanaza.com/

That's what we really need for management!, but of course, open source and not closed source. And their price is just too steep.

-Karl

On 31/05/2015 11:40 AM, "Karl Wagner" <karl....@gmail.com> wrote:

Here we go, Terry!

LAN port and WAN working great.

OpenWrt Barrier Breaker 14.07 r44952 TL-WR841N/ND

Village Telco - Small Enterprise Campus Network

Version:     SECN-3_0-RC1b TLWR841

Build date:  2015-05-19-17:32

GitHub:      vt-firmware secn_3.0-RC2-4-g42470342e5