I tried the new August 15th, 2015 CHK
Same error
This firmware file is incorrect! Please get the firmware file again and make sure it is the correct firmware for this product.
The smaller CHK loaded perfectly, it warned me the version was the same (I assume the version is in the header, and you copied the header from the latest release).
Here is the info from the status screen after the first boot. The CPU temperature seems very high. Is that accidentally in Fahrenheit?
Code:
Router Model Netgear R6300V2
Firmware Version DD-WRT v24-sp2 (08/15/14) - build 24865M
Kernel Version Linux 3.10.52 #254 SMP Thu Aug 14 22:54:45 CEST 2014 armv7l
CPU Model ARMv7 Processor rev 0 (v7l)
CPU Cores 2
CPU Clock 800 MHz
CPU Temperature
CPU 83.6 °C / WL0 51.92 °C / WL1 53.50 °C
The smaller CHK loaded perfectly, it warned me the version was the same (I assume the version is in the header, and you copied the header from the latest release).
Here is the info from the status screen after the first boot. The CPU temperature seems very high. Is that accidentally in Fahrenheit?
Code:
Router Model Netgear R6300V2
Firmware Version DD-WRT v24-sp2 (08/15/14) - build 24865M
Kernel Version Linux 3.10.52 #254 SMP Thu Aug 14 22:54:45 CEST 2014 armv7l
CPU Model ARMv7 Processor rev 0 (v7l)
CPU Cores 2
CPU Clock 800 MHz
CPU Temperature
CPU 83.6 °C / WL0 51.92 °C / WL1 53.50 °C
I'm getting reboots after just a minute or two of real use. Idle it will sit for hours, but once I try to do something like copy files to a USB drive with Samba, it reboots.
The CPU temp doesn't go above 72C during the copying. So I don't think it's overheating.
I'm powering it using a TPLink POE Injector/Splitter.
It looks like heavy network use can also cause a reboot in general since it went offline/online when I was trying to test the wireless.
Should I send it back for a replacement? (this was a refurb from eBay)
Are you certain the power voltage is not dipping too low under workload? POE can be problematic sometimes. I would test with a local power supply (I know, I know, I'm sure there is a good reason you're using POE, local power is not used for a reason.) Maybe you could put a gell cell there (or even a car battery) for test purposes.
I had a system on a tower, a long run away. It required a tiny amount of power, and I thought I could use POE on the data line. I was too optimistic, and when I ran a parallel 16 ga wire for the power, it worked fine, but the POE just could not deliver the power I needed at the distance I needed, tiny as it was. Reboots on workload was exactly symptom I had.
wa4otj, you were right, it was the POE.
When I plugged it in directly at my desk, no failures. Now my puzzle is what to do about the voltage drop, maybe a big capacitor to even out drops, or a shorter ethernet run (I used a cable double the size I need).
.... But then I realized the NTFS support in DD-WRT is horribly slow.
Unless someone has come up with some patches for NTFS-3G, or a way to integrated Tuxera's faster driver, the NTFS drive support is too slow for me.
http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-embedded/performance/
Some of my files are larger than 4GB so no FAT32, and there appears there is no exFAT support in DD-WRT. I formatted the drive for EXT4 with mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1 by telneting in.
Now I get around 26MBytes per second on write. At least 10x faster than the NTFS. But plugging the drive into my PC gets me close to 100MBytes per second. I would expect at least 60MBytes per second over gigabit ethernet. I wonder if the USB3 support in DD-WRT is no quicker than the USB2 support?
(1) If the drop is truly minor, a really big capacitor might do it. In my experience that is unlikely to work. If you try it, go BIG.
(2) The same kind of solution could be approached by using a small gel-cell to "float" the router. When the router's demands are low, the POE would trickle charge the gel-cell, which would then pick up the slack on peaks. You could even possibly add a small solar cell to help boost the cell's charging when the sun is shining if you wanted to get creative.
(3) That said, I would not go with either above solution. I would run a separate power wire of heavy enough gauge to carry the load without voltage drop. You did not say much about your specific installation and there are a lot of variables, so I would be "winging it" to give advice. But when I had something marginally similar to what you describe, I ran a 16 Ga wire. It was outdoors, so I got wire intended for Malibu lights. That worked well for me. You need to do the math before just buying wire however. You might also need a higher voltage power supply than came with the router to compensate for wire losses.
(4) If the losses are STILL too great for the wire (I once did one that was over 1700 ft up a mountain) I would put a 'brick' regulator at the router (This one works well but may be underpowered for this router. But something similar. http://www.goldmine-elec-products.com/prodinfo.asp?number=G17936 ) and feed it from the other end with a much more robust power supply. In the installation I am thinking about, I used the Kepco, and fed it with a 36 volt power supply. The wire losses were high, but I still got a nice clean regulated 12VDC at the router, and it's worked well for a long time without reliability issues. As I suggested, the little Kepco I point to may not be enough for this router. But now I am curious about how much it actually draws. The manual says 2.5 amps, but I doubt seriously it is really that much. Probably well under an amp, but what do I know?
But then, how do you plan to power the disk drive you mentioned? I would say the 2.5 A spec assumes worst case loads on the USB ports. Without disks or other loads it might be pretty low.
(5) I cannot really speak to the File System performance, but I plan to play around with it. Let us know what you learn. I want to put a DLNA server on it, and host MP4 movie files. I need to be able to feed about 4 or 5 streams. Not difficult at all with a computer, but if the router can't do it, I may have to seek a different approach.
I know NTFS on any *nix tends to be slow. Is there some reason you need NTFS?
My location is not that remote, it's just in the attic, no AC outlets up there, so I thought POE would be a clean solution. Solar is out, no windows.
As for file performance, I've dealt with this before on a real file server (quad core Core2 with 8GB of RAM) using both OpenSuSE and XUbuntu. The speed of writing to NTFS was insane. It took a weeks to copy what should have taken an afternoon to copy. In the end, it was faster to plug the drive into a windows machine, and use SMB to fill it. Most of the blame seems to be that NTFS-3G works well enough, so there has been little incentive to replace it.
As for why NTFS. The drive was full of files, and already formatted as NTFS. I can plug it into any machine and read/write to it. FAT32 does not support large files.
Now that I've tested with EXT4, I'm going to reformat it to NTFS so I can use it as a general drive, not having to install drivers on any Win machine it's plugged into.
Next step is trying POE again without the harddrive, just as a 802.11ac AP. If it still reboots, I'll try a shorter network cable. If that doesn't work. I'll run AC power up into the attic (someday), or look at a 12V UPS as a fun project.
A small gell cell can trickle charge at very low current levels without any real circuitry, just keep the maximum charge rate very, very low. It all depends on the particulars. It could act to stabilize the voltage quite nicely, but like I said, I really would not go that route. A regulator brick would be much preferred, and more reliable, hopefully.
You might be able to get away with just boosting the voltage slightly at the downstairs end. The little "wall-wart" that comes with the router is rated at 12V DC. I would throw a volt meter on the cable at the router end, and see how much it is dropping in the run. Then boost the the voltage fed in downstairs.
e.g. If the voltage under load in the attic is 10V, then I would try a 14V feed below, on the assumption that it can drop 2 volts and still deliver 12V to the router. It would help to have a continuously variable power supply handy....
Just be careful, as too much voltage can fry something. Under no condition would I go above about 15V. The router should be relatively forgiving as long as you stay in the 11-14 volt range at the router, but extreme care is called for....
In the case where I was running low voltage DC up a mountain, I had a variable power supply, and a "crowbar" circuit at the top, as well as an unused pair in the Cat5 providing a remote voltmeter function. I was putting in 36 volts at the base and losing a LOT to wire losses, but it worked well. Still works well, I should say.
With a much shorter run of wire, and no harddrive, it seemed to work with POE.
But once I put a heavy load on it by transferring a bunch of files over wireless, it rebooted.
So I've ordered a POE injector rated at 60W, the WS-GPOE-6-48v60w to replace the TP-LINK TL-PoE150S I was using. Then I can play around with POE with other devices as well.
If that doesn't work, then it's the TP-LINK TL-POE10R splitter that's the problem.
Any recommendations on a inexpensive gigabit splitter that can handle a range of input voltages? Most I've looked at specify 48V input, and I bet if the voltage is outside that then the 12V will be off.
I'm not familiar with a wide range of such hardware, but I know that due to the limitations of the fine gauge wire used in CAT5, the total amount of power you can put down the wire is limited to a few watts. The use of 48V with DC-DC converters is to overcome losses in the wire. 802.3at Type 2 allows for 30W delivered to the pse at 57 volts.
I would suggest that the first question you need to settle is precisely how much power you really need to run all the equipment ( router, disk drive, etc. ) you put at the remote end. Perhaps putting a current meter in the 12 line and see what the real draw is under max workload. Then you can do something intelligent about engineering a solution. Going by the router spec, assuming USB powered drive and no additional power, 12V at 2.5A is 30 watts. You are very close to the limits right there. A little creative ad-hoc engineering might be able to get it all to work reliably, but the first step is to accurately define the requirements and do the math.
If you can get to the location to pull in an additional cable, consider forgetting about PoE and just run a heavier gauge cable for the power. 12 ga wire at 100 feet carrying 2.5A will have 0.79V drop, and thus require no special efforts. 12 ga zip cord (speaker wire) is not all that expensive, and would make a much cleaner solution. If you can get it run into the space.
If your power needs exceed 2.5A, you can up the supply voltage slightly. A 14 volt supply will deliver 5A to the load with 1.6V drop, for 12.4V at the load. I think that is a cleaner solution, overall, IF you can do it. If not, well, PoE might get there but it seems marginal to me.
When the stronger injector gets here on Wednesday, I'll pull it all down again from the attic.
Then I can measure the voltage at the injector, and at the splitter, and measure the load the router consumes both with and without the USB 3.0 harddrive.
I can hardly wait since I was able to get a 866.5Mbps connection from my desktop to the router, and I want to run some benchmarks to see what sort of throughput I'll really get.
Hey guys I'm relieved to see yall have made some progress with these 'CH' versioned R6300's.
Just to be clear though. Once I upload this initial
http://www.desipro.de/ddwrt/K3-AC-Arm/Initial/dd-wrt.K3_R6250.chk
do I then use a 6300 build from there? Any recommendations? or any recent ones I should avoid? Thanks very much for paving the way. I cant stand this netgear firmware.... great router piss poor firmware...
Also, I had always thought the CH stood for Charter my ISP. They appear to be OEMing them from Netgear as mine arrived shrinkwrapped in a retail box but with several stickers affixed to the router regarding default SSID and a big one on the back about how tappering with cable lines and equipment is a federal offense. Definately rebranded or custom rolled for my provider..
Yes, once you use the initial file, the standard file loads fine. I am using mine without problems thus far. I will be putting it to work soon where it will work hard. Looking forward to seeing it perform...
You can only use regular builds dated AFTER the CH changes. So nothing from before August 16th 2014.
On the discussion of POE, I did finally get the R6300V2 CH running reliably over POE by using a more powerful injector (1.25A 48V), and higher rated splitter (2A 12V). Seems the inexpensive TL-LINK injector and splitter I was trying are simply not able to handle more than about 1A 12V.
I went with a passive injector, the WS-GPOE-6-48v60w. And the POE-162s splitter which handles passive.
