I was running a small WIFI network with a B1300 and a few repeaters around the place (AR-300M’s), having multiple SSIDs was giving some of the clients trouble so I got two more B1300 and thought I would run a MESH network.
It has only been going for a week and has been nothing but trouble.
The mesh never recovers after a power failure, weather it is a complete blackout or just the master that looses power, sometimes times it’s one slave, often it’s both that need repairing. I’ve got one slave that has been slow blinking it’s mesh led, which I think means it is healing the mesh, it has been doing this for two days since the last time I power cycled the master. Is there any way to get the mesh to recover better?
Also, occasionally the WIFI network goes dead, it is still up, clients can still join, they just can’t get through the router to the LAN network, the only solution to this is power cycle the master.
The WIFI coverage is lousy, it is much much worse than when it was just one B1300. I’m not sure how that is achieved. My Iphone prefers to log onto my neighbors network rather that the B1300 that is sharing the desktop with it, it’s as if the master B1300 has decided to cut down the power or something. It use to work fine on 5G when it was one B1300, but now there are 3 in a mesh the coverage has gotten a lot worse.
Tonights problem is that the master isn’t talking to anything, the WIFI network is still working and WIFI clients can get to the internet, but I can’t WEB or SSH to the router any more, I guess it needs another power cycle.
I tried putting all nodes within 6 meters of each other, line of sight, no obstetrical, and still some clients in the same room still can’t see the network.
Has the Mesh network code been debugged yet? Is it still in Alpha? What is the best way to debug anything? It doesn’t seem to be putting anything useful in the log on the master and I have no idea how to talk to the slaves.
Also how can I get the master to tell me what is happening in the slaves and which clients are connecting to them?
Will one of the more conventional OpenWRT mesh methods work with these routers?