AR750 Access point stability issues

Goz · 2020-11-17T09:37:47.845Z

I’ve set my AR750 up as an acess point and everythign seems to connect as you would expect. However I am having some form of stability issue. Every few minutes when I go to a web page it just stops responding. Whats really odd is that if I’m streaming something the stream never seems to break.

Its as if the DNS look up is failing which is odd because my windows is set manually to 8.8.8.8.

Further to this when I run a speedtest from time to time it will do the download test perfectly and then fail on the upload test.

The wifi stays connected the whole time and even when a website is not responding the router’s interface works perfectly. There is nothing in the log (all I can see is me connecting to the box and then no other messages).

I’m running 3.0.27

Anybody got any idea what on earth is going on? Its driving me mad …

alzhao · 2020-11-18T11:09:53.874Z

Did you set up any vpn on the router?

Goz · 2020-11-18T11:46:52.651Z

Nope its purely connected to my router. Its got an ip address, and I get an IP address for my machine. Its just it seems to lose the connection and nothing gets reported in the log that I can see …

Goz · 2020-11-18T11:48:34.227Z

that said I am getting the following message every couple of minutes:

daemon.err odhcp6c[2086]: Failed to send DHCPV6 message to ff02::1:2 (Permission denied)

Goz · 2020-11-18T12:00:10.416Z

Accessing the router from the main wifi doesn’t ever seem to give me connection failures … its only accessing the internet when connected to the wifi on the access point.

alzhao · 2020-11-19T04:33:20.279Z

Can you let me know if you set up “Access Point” which means a bridge to your main router? or you mean just connect cable from mini router’s wan to your main router’s lan?

We have a snapshot firmware which should not have these ipv6 problems GL.iNet download center

Can you try and let me know?

Goz · 2020-11-19T10:54:30.109Z

Yes it IS access point mode ip addresses are given out by my main router.

I’m running an AR750 so is the snapshot up to date for that too?

Goz · 2020-11-19T20:40:40.099Z

I’ve updated to the snapshot firmware. I’m going to run it in router mode for a bit and see how it goes … then I’ll switch to acess point and see if becomes unstable again.

Goz · 2020-11-20T06:18:25.053Z

ok so i switched to access point and I’m back to having connection issues. Router mode works perfectly so I’ve reverted to that for now. Going to have to see if I can set up the subnet masks to make the 2 networks accessible to each other …

Goz · 2020-11-24T11:02:18.626Z

Ok I’ve switched to the beta1 firmware. But I’m still getting the same problems. In fact, having used it in standard router mode I’m noticing it can be a bit stuttery. Sometimes websites can be a bit slow to respond. It doesn’t drop out completely though like in access point mode.

It always seems to be when initiating a new connection so I wonder if its DNS lookup related? But thats a total guess.

alzhao · 2020-11-26T04:29:22.937Z

I don’t know why but should not be dns problem.

When in AP mode you can find its IP in your main router. Can you ssh to it and check the log?

Goz · 2020-11-26T20:20:26.213Z

Which log in particular?

alzhao · 2020-11-27T02:56:33.767Z

just “logread” is fine.

Goz · 2020-11-30T21:58:41.458Z

Absolutely nothing appears in the logread after I’ve SSH’d in. All I see in the log is the message showing my login. After that silence for 10 minutes, despite my connection to the wider internet stopping working for over a minute at one point.

I did try changing my wifi channel but that made no difference

alzhao · 2020-12-01T04:31:37.877Z

Goz:

Absolutely nothing appears in the logread after I’ve SSH’d in

There must be some log. Can you post?

Goz · 2020-12-04T09:21:01.032Z

Right I’ve just been suffering the issues. Everything stopped working for a while …

This is the entirety of the logread for the last 10 hours…

Fri Dec 4 03:53:59 2020 daemon.notice netifd: lan (29503): udhcpc: sending renew to 192.168.2.1
Fri Dec 4 03:53:59 2020 daemon.notice netifd: lan (29503): udhcpc: lease of 192.168.2.233 obtained, lease time 43200
Fri Dec 4 09:09:14 2020 daemon.info hostapd: wlan0: STA f8:ff:c2:06:65:5d IEEE 802.11: authenticated
Fri Dec 4 09:09:14 2020 daemon.info hostapd: wlan0: STA f8:ff:c2:06:65:5d IEEE 802.11: associated (aid 1)
Fri Dec 4 09:09:14 2020 daemon.notice hostapd: wlan0: AP-STA-CONNECTED f8:ff:c2:06:65:5d
Fri Dec 4 09:09:14 2020 daemon.info hostapd: wlan0: STA f8:ff:c2:06:65:5d RADIUS: starting accounting session 06D53ECB93BE0E37
Fri Dec 4 09:09:14 2020 daemon.info hostapd: wlan0: STA f8:ff:c2:06:65:5d WPA: pairwise key handshake completed (RSN)
Fri Dec 4 09:12:45 2020 authpriv.info dropbear[22525]: Child connection from 192.168.2.189:61601
Fri Dec 4 09:12:49 2020 authpriv.notice dropbear[22525]: Password auth succeeded for ‘root’ from 192.168.2.189:61601

While at 9:14 (when the above logread was run) no websites were responding and I got the following tracert from google’s DNS

Tracing route to dns.google [8.8.8.8]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 * * * Request timed out.
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 * * * Request timed out.
4 * * * Request timed out.
5 * * * Request timed out.
6 * * * Request timed out.
7 * 15 ms 20 ms 209.85.252.181
8 13 ms 11 ms 14 ms dns.google [8.8.8.8]

Trace complete.

Fruther to this I re-ran the tracert from my laptop and got the following result:

Tracing route to dns.google [8.8.8.8]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 * * * Request timed out.
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 * * * Request timed out.
4 13 ms 13 ms 16 ms 51-148-73-153.dsl.zen.co.uk [51.148.73.153]
5 13 ms 13 ms 13 ms 72.14.223.28
6 14 ms 14 ms 14 ms 209.85.249.149
7 * * * Request timed out.
8 * * * Request timed out.
9 * * * Request timed out.
10 * * * Request timed out.
11 * * * Request timed out.
12 * * * Request timed out.
13 * * 12 ms dns.google [8.8.8.8]

Trace complete.

While runnign it directly from the router (at the same time) I got this:

traceroute to 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 192.168.2.1 1.732 ms
2 51.148.72.21 11.819 ms
3 51.148.73.172 12.123 ms
4 51.148.73.167 11.647 ms
5 72.14.223.28 12.212 ms
6 *
7 8.8.8.8 12.048 ms

Goz · 2020-12-04T09:32:32.522Z

I have then switched the box to router mode and re-run the tracert and I get a perfect trace as follows:

Tracing route to dns.google [8.8.8.8]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms GL-AR750 [192.168.8.1]
2 4 ms 2 ms 1 ms TECHNICOLOR [192.168.2.1]
3 13 ms 12 ms 13 ms vt1.cor1.lond1.ptn.zen.net.uk [51.148.72.21]
4 14 ms 13 ms 14 ms lag-8.p1.thn-lon.zen.net.uk [51.148.73.158]
5 13 ms 12 ms 14 ms 51-148-73-153.dsl.zen.co.uk [51.148.73.153]
6 13 ms 13 ms 13 ms 72.14.223.28
7 14 ms 14 ms 13 ms 209.85.249.149
8 13 ms 12 ms 13 ms 209.85.252.181
9 12 ms 12 ms 12 ms dns.google [8.8.8.8]

Trace complete.

So definitely something odd in access point mode …

alzhao · 2020-12-04T11:44:47.332Z

I have no idea why but can you try 3.105 firmware from GL.iNet download center

gimmick · 2021-02-26T17:38:30.599Z

Hello,

Unfortunately, I am also having unstability issues when using the GL-AR750S-Ext in Access Point mode. I have installed the latest firmware (3.105) but that did not help. That’s disappointing.

Do I have any option besides switching to the Router mode or to another device?

Thanks

Goz · 2021-08-16T08:21:59.419Z

Well I might finally have cracked this. I was reading through the openwrt documentation:

OpenWrt Wiki – 5 Feb 11

Wireless Access Point (aka "Dumb" Access Point)

Wireless Access Point (aka "Dumb" Access Point) Summary: This document describes how to create and add a wireless access point (AP), sometimes called a “dumb AP”, to an existing network with a single main router. The term dumb is used since the...

One of the parts said this:

In the top menu go to System → Startup, and disable firewall, dnsmasq and odhcpd in the list of startup scripts

So I have now done this and so far I have had the access point working stably. I will report back if I continue to get problems.