Posted: Wed Jul 17, 2024 2:20 Post subject: Cursed R7450 (includes several bug reports)
(Happy to be redirected to a proper forum; didn't see a call out for a MediaTek-based router.)
I seem to have a cursed Netgear AC2600 (R7450) with firmware r57200 (and earlier). I have been trying for the past several weeks to set up this router. The most common final state of an attempt is a router with perfectly reasonable LEDs that passes no traffic and has no active radios. The most recent attempt has been the most successful. I'll discuss this attempt in detail. The start of this attempt is based on the observation in several previous attempts that fragments of configuration from even earlier attempts kept appearing and disappearing while trying to set up the router. This is after several rounds of 30 second resetting to reset to factory defaults. So ...
(Re-)flashed r57200. Immediately went to the GUI and flashed r57200 with "After Flashing: Reset to Factory Defaults". After the subsequent reboot, telnetted in and listed out the nvram. I saw many variables associated to old VLANs and subinterfaces, more than 80% of these were *_hwaddr variables.
Bug report: These had not been cleared by resetting to factory defaults (repeatedly).
I manually removed these variables and rebooted the router to ensure that what was left still worked. It did. I configured the WAN ("Disabled", which is evidently mislabelled) and LAN settings and rebooted.
Bug report: "Setup: Basic Setup: WAN Setup: WAN Connection Type: Connection Type: Disabled" is evidently wrong. The port is still enabled. This should probably be "join with LAN ports" or "assign to vlan1" or "asign to br0", whichever is *actually* correct.
Bug report: There is no clear delineation between VLANs in Setup: Basic Setup: Switch Config and vlans in Setup: Basic Setup: Networking. Is the Switch config setting filtering for ingress, tagging for egress, binding physical ports to Setup: Basic Setup: Networking vlan#s? The completely empty Help block is not helpful.
Bug Report: It is common to come to the Setup: Basic Setup: Switch Config page, see that Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN): VLAN Configuration: Vlans is "Enable"d, modify the check boxes in the table, click Save and have the page reload with Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN): VLAN Configuration: Vlans is "Disable"d and when I (re?-)enable it, the changes to the table have not been saved.
Bug report: Historically, the router most often self-bricked when changing Setup: Basic Setup: Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN): Port: WAN from VLAN Configuration: "2" to "1" and "2". Not clear how that blocks access from all ports. Also not clear that vlan2 should exist after setting Setup: Basic Setup: WAN Setup: WAN Connection Type: Connection Type: Disabled. Or maybe VLAN 2 shouldn't exist. It's not clear which describes 802.1 tags on wires and which describes internal virtual objects.
Set up wired:
For trusted traffic, mostly between router: vlan1 and (totally useless) vlan2, tied together via br0 to eth0 (i.e. untagged or 802.1q tag "1").
Set up wireless SSIDs:
SSID: WeirdhouseT (for IoT usage, with long recycle time password) wlan0 and wlan1, tied together and to 802.1q VLAN 20 on interface eth0.20 via br20.
SSID: WeirdhouseT (for guest usage, with guest password) wlan0.1 and wlan1.1, tied together and to 802.1q VLAN 10 on interface eth0.10 via br10.
(If reading that the two SSIDs are the same makes you think "that can't work". Nope. It's working fine on the other dd-wrt and non-dd-wrt routers. Properly functioning devices iterate through same-named SSID's attempting the same zero-knowledge proof of passwords until one works or all fail. This has to work that way since one base station operator has no control over the SSIDs used by some other operator on some other base station. This is also why password verification is by zero-knowledge proof - so that another base station's operator can't sniff your passwords via a duplicated SSID.)
Bug report: It takes several minutes for the list of interfaces to catch up on the Setup: Networking page. During this time system load is around 2.0. (Even afterwards, when essentially idle, system load is around 1.5. ssh: top shows a total of 1.2% system load, so it is *very* unclear why the load averages are so high.)
Rebooted. Not bricked. Wait a few minutes for various interfaces to actually start and do things. Check Status: Wireless.
Bug report: When showing the Setup: Basic Setup or Wireless: Basic Settings page, the Setup through NAT/QoS tabs have active regions that reach from the bottom to the top of the tab. When the pointer is in the active region, the tab highlights and clicking the tab opens that tab's page. The Administration and Status buttons have an active region that seems to reach from the bottom of the tab to the baseline of the text label. Moving the pointer onto the tab on or above the text, the tab does not highlight and clicking does not open the tab's page.
0 packets through wlan0, wlan0.1, wlan1, and wlan1.1. Well, that's not good. Load up an 802.11 channel scanner app on my phone. No WeirdhouseTs present; the non-test routers are working fine. Check that the Wireless: Basic Settings are sane; drop the channel widths to 20 MHz and 40 MHz for "safe settings that should work everywhere". Reboot.
Hey. See around a packet per second. Yay. Pull up the channel scanner: there's WeirdhouseT on both radios at > -30 dB. (The non-test routers are at < -60 dB. The phone can associate with those networks from the testing location.) Have the phone connect to WeirdhouseT with one password. Long delay: Incorrect Password. Phone (Android 13) turns off WiFi. (Wow, I've never gotten a password so wrong my device decided to turn off the relevant networking device.) Turn WiFi back on then try the other password. Incorrect password; disable WiFi.
Wait an hour; try again. Same: long delay, incorrect password, disable WiFi.
Hmm... This router feels a little warm; maybe something's getting hot. Check Status: Router: Sensors. The WLAN0, WLAN1, mt7615_phy0 temp1, and mt7615_phy1 temp1 are variously 47 and 48 degrees C, which is warmer than I want to stand around in, but not too hot for hardware.
Feature request: These temperatures are apparently not exposed through whatever interface lm-sensors uses to detect and report temperatures. It would be generally handy if lm-sensors was able to provide temperature data for monitoring and scripting.
At this point, I'm convinced this router is cursed and am happy to send it to whoever might be able to exorcise its demons and/or improve dd-wrt's support for the Netgear R7450.
Joined: 08 May 2018 Posts: 15248 Location: Texas, USA
Posted: Wed Jul 17, 2024 3:03 Post subject:
Well, I had no control over the White Tornado effect of spite that happened in my 'absence', but I made a slight edit so maybe it'll help (and I moved your post to the right forum):
Well, I had no control over the White Tornado effect of spite that happened in my 'absence', but I made a slight edit so maybe it'll help (and I moved your post to the right forum):
No idea what "White Tornado" you're talking about. (Thanks!)
No idea which psychic power I'd use to find that post, necessary for correct routing.
kernel-panic69 wrote:
WAN disabled automagically assigns the WAN port to br0/vlan1 so it can be used.
Setup: Networking: Interface Setup: Port Setup: WAN Port Assignment = vlan2 is incompatible with this claim. Of course, while testing your claim, it bricked again. BTW: I'm *not* accessing it through the WAN port, so changing WAN port settings *shouldn't* make the router inaccessible. But it is now. So, guess I'm resetting to factory defaults again. One half hour walk there and back. Nope. Still reports vlan2 whether "disabled (but not really)" or not.
kernel-panic69 wrote:
I'm not going to read further into your OP since you obviously don't understand how things work and didn't obviously search for MediaTek or R7450.
Well, the R7000-100NASs are running dd-wrt with a slightly more complicated setup just fine and are the model for settings for this R7450.
Searching for MediaTek: https://forum.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/index.php. Notice that most fora are based on the radio chip source. <ctrl>-F Media ... Nothing. Well, guess I'll post generic. No, wait. Maybe there's a forum link in the supported devices page? https://wiki.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_Devices#Netgear ... R7450 ... Nope; not even an Install Guide. Well, then I'll have to post generic. If your thought is that a search for "MediaTek" is going to turn up the one post you cite, you vastly overestimate the ability of search engines to guess what *you* mean when *I* type a search term.
I did plenty of research on the various problems. What I found:
Reset to factory defaults:
I'm aware what https://wiki.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Reset_And_Reboot has to say about nvram variables that dd-wrt created (which, just to be clear, does not have the same semantics as "If you added new non-factory variables..."). What is a bug is having stale settings from prior configurations firebombing the current configuration effort, leading to bricking. Having no way to get a clean slate to configure from without manually removing every hidden landmine through the CLI immediately after resetting is a bug.
"disable something to make something unable to work so that it cannot be used"
Wrongheaded existence of vlan2 after setting Setup: Basic Setup: WAN Setup: WAN Connection Type: Connection Type: Disabled:
As clearly explained at https://wiki.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Default_internal_device_network vlan2 is vacuous when the WAN Connection Connection Type is "Disabled". Having Setup: Networking: Interface Setup: Port Setup: WAN Port Assignment: indicate "vlan2" is wrong.
Only Broadcom based devices support port-based VLAN's, no Atheros or Ralink devices. Non-Broadcom platforms support 802.1q VLAN tagging via the Networking page options
Great. That means the Setup: Basic Setup: Switch Config tab *cannot even appear* in the GUI. But there it is. So, like so much documentation on the forum, this must be out of date.
Or maybe this forum information isn't out of date and I'm supposed to psychically know not to use the presented GUI elements.
https://wiki.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Switched_Ports also tells us "If you have no vLAN 0: probably your WAN port is port 0, and the others are 1-4. vlan1 is your default internal LAN; vlan2 is your default WAN." So this page will use vLAN # and vlan# to represent different things. I wonder which is an 802.1q tag and which is an internal virtual object.
"Tried same configuration only with a 2.4ghz AP. Also turned out to be unstable. Reset, flash r49492, reset, configure, reboot, no IP received from AP while connected to station bridged."
"Nothing. Works.
"Currently default settings after like the fifth time rolling back to stock and upgrading again.
Load when idle:
The R7000-100NASs are currently showing system load averages: 0.00 0.00 0.00 5/91 23893 and CPU breakdown: CPU: 0.0% usr 0.0% sys 0.0% nic 99.3% idle 0.0% io 0.0% irq 0.4% sirq.
The R7450 has just been reset to factory defaults again and is currently showing system load averages: 1.64 1.11 1.09 2/82 3702 and CPU breakdown: CPU: 0.7% usr 0.6% sys 0.0% nic 98.5% idle 0.0% io 0.0% irq 0.0% sirq.
So it's completely unclear why the R7450 has something busy-waiting, with something always runnable (or uninterruptible).
I however, have gotten Entware to make gkrellmd buildable without the X client (https://github.com/opnsense/ports/issues/167, for use with an OPNsense router, which is also working fine with several VLANs configured and does make clear what is configuring 802.1q ingress tag filters and egress tagging and what is creating internal virtual objects). Even with Entware's lm-sensors and gkrellmd installed and running, gkrellmd is unable to fetch the temperature data from lm-sensors and
Code:
sensors
reports two temperatures, not the four displayed in the GUI.
Joined: 08 May 2018 Posts: 15248 Location: Texas, USA
Posted: Wed Jul 17, 2024 14:10 Post subject:
We'll expect your device Wiki write-ups and other Wiki edits as well as code patches somewhere in this thread.
Sorry, my queue is well beyond full, and I don't live, sleep, breathe, eat, drink, walk, talk, urinate, or defecate
DD-WRT 24/7 - and if you look at Recent Changes, you will see it's been a one-legged man in an ass-kicking
contest . I *just* noticed Mile-Lile's new ctrld wiki
Yes, my err was vlan2 is assigned to br0 when WAN disabled, but cognitive dissonance seems to be present to
not connect that and rather vilify previous comment.
I guess finding the Search Button in the whitespace above wasn't quite obvious to search for "MediaTek"
No further comment on the rest of your walls of text. Not taking any of this personally, it's just that it's the same
ol' complaints and noise from another vector source without feedback in any recent build threads. Take care now. _________________ "Life is but a fleeting moment, a vapor that vanishes quickly; All is vanity"
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