No WAN/WiFi if eth1 LAN cable unplugged (even when NOT bridged) :-/

Technical Support for Routers
1

Hello

 

I’ve had my Domino since the Kickstarter. But I’ve never been able to get it to work such that I can communicate with it purely via WiFi. No matter what I do, whether eth1 is bridged to wan0 or not, the WiFi radio seems to shut down – or at least disconnect – if there is no physical Ethernet cable plugged into the eth1 port. This means that my Domino cannot be used without a physical, wired connection, which is useless for anything IoT, of course.

So, if anyone has their Domino working with only WiFi and no Ethernet, I would love to have a copy of your /etc/config/network file.

Many thanks in advance,

Gruvin
New Zaland

2

Hi Gruvin,

The board should work with wireless with the stock firmware without configuration. Have you changed anything?

So, you mean that you can see the radio but cannot connect to it, right? Did it ask for WiFi password and accept it?

3

Thanks for the reply @alzhao.

Nope. That’s not what I meant, sorry. Oh and no, this is the stock, “out-of-the-box” domino, as received in the post, from the Kickstarter campaign.

I have the WiFi set up in CLIENT mode. It connects to my local access point, no problem. Works fine.

The problem is that the WiFi completely shuts down if I unplug the Ethernet (eth1) cable. My expectation is that the WiFi client would remain connected to my AP, thus allowing access to the Domino solely over WiFi – with no Ethernet cable involved.

But as I said, the WiFi shuts down (disconnects, vanishes completely from all external perspectives) when the Ethernet cable is disconnected! Weird. When I reconnect the Ethernet cable (on eth1), the wlan interface fires up again, sends a DHCP request, gets an IP and comes back online just as it was before the eth1 cable was unplugged. Bizarre.

So – the wlan interface only works at all (in client mode) if eth1 has an active connection present.

Now, if the two interfaces were bridged, that might make sense. But they are not. Incidentally, that the only thing I have changed, using LuCI. The WiFi wlan interface is on wan0 (on its own) and eth1 is on lan (on its own +/- IPv6)

So in summary, it appears that wlan and eth1 are inexplicably “one way bridged” at some level. I should note that eth1 still works fine if the WiFi is disconnected, not configured or whatever.

I am assuming that if I had wlan configured as an access point, this would all go away. But that simply doesn’t suit my needs – far as I can figure, anyway.

Thanks for your time.

Bryan.

 

4

I’ve 3x Domino working fine with Wifi only, no eth0 connected.

 

5

@gruvin, if you can post the content of your /etc/config/network and /etc/config/wireless, we can check what is in the problem

6

Be sure to post you firewall config as well.

7

Thanks for the replies @martinayotte, @alzhao and @Gregg.

It turns out, not surprisingly I’m sure, that there was a serious problem between the keyboard and chair! This has now been resolved.

I am happy to report that I have got things working just fine. The root of the cause comes down to numb nuts here reading “WAN” as “Wireless Area Network”, despite 20+ years experience in the networking world. Unbelievable! :stuck_out_tongue:

 

8

Wireless Area Network!!!

9

@alzhao – I know! Right? Geeze. It also had to do with how LuCI has “interfaces” listed, but in fact the wireless, “interface” is on its own page. I saw the “W” in the interfaces list and just registered, “W for wireless”, actually paying no attention to the AN part. LOL sigh

What bothers me the most though is that this same thing occurred in my brain multiple times, over several weeks. Good grief! I just didn’t think to question my thinking. I’ve been doing network engineering on and off for 20+ years. It’s not like I don’t (didn’t?) know what I’m doing, after all! LOL

I’m getting too old for this stuff, apparently.