You don't sound dumb at all
Good job!

Thanks a lot guys for the support. I can attest it's not typical on lots of other forums. With some assistance I'm sure I can figure most of this out but before I dive in further I have to comment on the WiFi, in general. My house is not big at all but some thick wwallscause issues. Should've done this much earlier but testing WiFi in the far end of my house (my son's room) speeds have dropped way down to 4 mbps, with ping 52. Compare that to literally just 15 feet away I'm getting 115mbps down.The speeds are clocking in faster than stock but range has bbeen cut down significantly. I'm more than eager to learn all I can but is this something that can be pinpointed?
Chadster, other than inputting a mount point for my hdd I haven't touched the settings. I can live with these for awhile if you think there's a solution. But just in case I'm a little unclear on your first response to me. I don't think I changed anything in the ui other than password and things that relate to external storage. So it's safe to just download stock fw and follow the procedure from the same page as the guide to flash your fw? I want to stress I REALLY don't want to do that but if I have to I'm just making sure it'll be ok.
Thanks.

Then you should be good because the wireless is still defaults for your initial testing.

The wireless signal should be as good or better than other routers. I've deployed many of these and found this to be the case.

Keep in mind that the 5Ghz is short range and super fast. 2.4Ghz is long range and slower. If you previously had the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz configured with the same SSID you might have been connecting to the 2.4Ghz instead of the 5Ghz at farther locations.

Is your ping test to the router or internet?
Do you have a Android mobile you can run Wifi Analyzer on to see the signal strength and wireless channels at different spots at the location?
Double check the antennas are fully screwed on.
Reboot the router.

Rebooted before I got your post. Speeds are back. I do have android phone and it's got WiFi analyzer. My phone only does 2.4. It's on channel 6 and ranges from -52db to 66db in the weakest spot of my house.
Sorry for my ignorance but I'm using ookla speed test. I didn't see an option to change ping so whatever default is where I'm going.Range is fine now. I always gI've said that same name but punctuate with 2.4 and 5 like you did. Unless I'm missing something there?
I've read about your fw and am supremely confident it works great. But when I read some of the speeds people are getting I shake my head. How? Are they tweaking your defaults of does my isp suck? it's not like I have a choice but I'm told Comcast blast plus is one of the fastest. I've never come close to 500mbps and read some people are getting close to a gb!I know that's not a question but if you have a comment or alink to explain I'm curious.
Anyway. Speeds are back to normal. I guess the next task is to get ext storage working again. Now it shows up as sdb. Which is how it appeared on my ubuntu server awhile back. I know it's not something you use but I think I'll figure it out eventually.
**The simpler things are really impeding my progress. I'm having a hard time ssh-ing into the router. I keep getting authentication failure. This would typically be a headache on my Mac but I usually get through. I don't recall ever having problems using juice on Android but I can't get access.I need this to follow that dlna guide you sent me. Once I do get ssh to work, the app that needs to be installed, luci app minidlna is not available under available packages. The guide implies it should be there to download and install. I'll keep trying to get ssh access but if anyone is familiar with this app please share. Thanks
****Figured it out. I have ssh access. But have no idea about the luci minidlna app. I'd assume I can hunt it down and install it but the fact it's not there already gives me pause since in the guide its already present. If anyone knows...I'm not goin anywhere. Thanks again and sorry for the long post. I'll try to hold off on the questions, especially the ones I wind up answering.

(Last edited by KLit75 on 13 Dec 2014, 01:10)

Well dmesg had a very long output. I'm not seeing the drive as mounted. Can you or anyone tell me why the eSATA light is on on the router but not the usb? The stock, with a little permissions hiccup here &there, mounted this drive easily. I looked over the minidlna guide and if I can locate the app it seems easy but kind of off puttingwhen I read a script may need to be manually restarted every time new media is added. Surely there's a better way?My speeds have dramatically improved, particularly on 5ghz. If it wasn't so much better I'd go back to stock because being able to use my router as a server was actually a selling point for me. I've thought about attempting Linux commands to mount it with rw but I'm proceeding with caution. So if anyone has any info please let me know.If minidlna is my only option please let me know where to get the luci minidlna. As I said earlier it's not listed in available packages.
***Just to follow-up and hopefully someone has some suggestions for tommorow. It's getting late on the east coast. I tried the luci mini dlna guide and did install the app (it's under a slightly different name) after entering the command via ssh the drive was not mounted as it was supposed to. I'm thinking wrong format?But I'm getting tired. Got tomorrow off and hopefully I'll get this working. Thanks for the help.

(Last edited by KLit75 on 13 Dec 2014, 05:19)

@KLit75

There's no exfat support in McWRT as far as I can tell. I would suggest you copy the contents of your external HDD, format it as ext4 and copy the contents back.

nitroshift

Thankyou! This was keeping me awake, but I thought it might be incompatible. Are you using ext 4? Just wondering if you needed to use minidlna, which I now have installed but still couldn't get it work. At least now I get some sleep. It's going to be awhile moving all these files back & forth but glad you told me. Thanks again!

@KLit75

My HDD is formatted in ext4 but I use samba shares for my media as I leave the transcoding to the media players / TV's. Minidlna is not working for you because it doesn't see any media on the drive as the file system is not supported. Move to ext4 and it will work.

nitroshift

(Last edited by nitroshift on 13 Dec 2014, 08:14)

Its a bug and probably will be fixed in the next release

Check if your antennas are set as described here

Don’t worry i believe this is the way you should proceed. Try to mount your drive first, check if you see your contents when navigating to the folder, or try to find out why mount fails. Once your drive is mounted you can move forward and set up apps and services using that drive. However doing it with caution is a good idea. Create some backup if you can, just in case.

How it is behaving with AA ??

Hello guys,

I want to buy a WRT1900AC because of the OS / OpenWRT support but i read that the openWRT stopped working on the  WRT1900AC support. Is that true? Or will there be more support?

Thanks for your help.

Your in the thread now for the development of the wrt1900ac.

I use samba shares too. And last night I was thinking dlna and upnp is something I didn't need before (even before I bought this router)but continued on because I figured it wouldnt hurt and at least my hdd might show up and I could figure it out from there. Not a smart way to go about but I was working under the thought that all disk formats are supported that worked with stock.I already started moving files but I might need to use 2 different externals and my pc hdd to clean this out. Hopefully by Sunday night I'll be ready to mount this. So does it automount? Or did you need to add the directory and mount point in the ui?

Thanks a lot! Yes I read that when I bought it and kept them in the upright position for my house with just one floor and a basement but signal is good down there. My speeds have probably doubled on 5ghz so I can't complain. Reboot fixed whatever I was grumbling about earlier.Still as I said before were talking a bump from 40 mb to 80+ and on my Mac in the same room where speeds tend to drop 70 to about 115.These suit me just fine but how are people going from 500 to 900+? I've read this on more than a few occassions.just preparing hdd now. Might be awhile before I mount it. Thanks for all the help!

Check out this link https://github.com/Chadster766/McWRT/wiki

I prepped the hdd faster than expected then made it ext 4 with with mini tool. It mounted automatically, I can write to it over smb share except for whatever reason there's one folder left over "Lost & found" My mac displays it with a red dot and I don't have permissions to access it--can't even delete. Normally I'd move on but it's taking up about 10% of my drive.
I see no option in Luci to change permissions. If anyone can assist with that it'd be great. I was using the linksys smart wifi and it doesn't have nearly as many features but setting permissions was pretty straightforward. In Luci I see "no" under the category "root"
***Also, I can connect to the smb share under guest but not registered user. Since I was still in the testing phases I haven't changed the default password for the ssid. I did change the router password. I've tried "root" as user and the defaults plus my new password but neither works. So as I'm typing I'm thinking maybe thats my issue? Thanks.

Thank you

Hi Chadster,I'm not sure the best question to ask so I'll give the info.after mounting my hdd last night I've noticed a significant drop in speeds. Internet speed isn't really noticeable except on speed test. On 5ghz I went from 115down to 60 today. Only reason I tested it is because my network transfer speeds are painfully slow. They were slow before the fw flash but now for example it's taking 3 hrs to transfer 5 gb.Any suggestions would be very appreciated.Thanks a lot.

***I don't mean to flood this thread but I'm having some more issues and if I'm lucky enough to get a response from someone who's dealt with similar issues, I figure it'd be better to give as much info as possible...
So after rebooting and remounting the filesystem my speeds on 5ghz are back and I'm able to see my drive mounted under mounted file systems in Luci. The problem now is my mac can't connect to it over smb. If I GO>Connect to server I can see sda1 and sdb1 but neither of those are my drive. I need to find mnt/sda2. It was there last night but since rebooting I just cant find in under smb. Like I said it shows up in Luci, and I checked enable mount, saved changes, rebooted and tried various cobos of that.
I even disabled antivirus to see if maybe there was something stopping the connection. I've had issues with mac being stubborn with permissions but this was fine last night and I hadn't done anything to it. In fact all I was doing was slowly transfering files.
I don't see a ton of options under mount in the ui. So there doesn't seem to be anything I did wrong but maybe something I'm missing.
BTW--I can see and connect to this drive over lan and ftp on my android phone. I've been looking at the mac forums thinking it's related to my computer but it did work last night and I didn't have trouble connecting with the stock linux. However, there it was formatted exfat, not ext 4 so maybe I need to ssh into it from mac? Any help would be awesome.
I'll keep doing the trial & error and see if I find anything online. Thanks.
***What worked was unmounting from ssh terminal then using the ui to mount. Now it's sdb2 instead of sda. Thats the way they used to mount in my ubuntu server. I could care less how they appear as long as I can access and write to the drive. I'm assuming this is the procedure after rebooting?--umount via ssh then recheck the box in the ui? Sorry for all the questions...really. I've looked into wireless networks before and there's a ton of info to sort through. If anyone has any links they think would be valuable please share. I've obviously got some learning to do. But my interests are just being able to access that network drive reliably and getting the best download and transfer speeds for now. Thanks Chadster! This is really cool! And thanks to everyone else who offered support.

(Last edited by KLit75 on 15 Dec 2014, 02:04)

Each ext4 partition has a lost+found folder. It was created together with the partition. Any recovered file during filesystem check will be moved here. I never deleted it, but i guess it's possible and won't make any problem. To do that you must ssh to the router with root. Dot in the beginning of the file or folder means its hidden.

Have you connected two drives to both usb ports? sda1 is the first partition on the first drive, sdb1 is the first partition on the second drive, etc.. It seems you plugged in some other drive as well in the meantime, so your sda2 changed to sdb2. Normally it should be mounted automatically on boot.

Have you installed samba package for luci? (luci-app-samba) If you did, you have a "Network Shares" tab under "Services" with more options. Like here.

Most of these are not openwrt related but generic linux questions, so if you check some generic linux howtos (mounting, filesystems, basic shell commands, etc) you will have better understanding whats going on, and that will boost your problem solving skills.

Finally i sorted out the mounting issues by replacing the external case. Based on my experience Raidsonic IcyBox ib-318stu3-b and IB-351StU3S-B had issues with drives above 2TB, however Revoltec EX307, and Sharkoon Rapid-Case worked fine.

Just locked up on 5ghz again

(Last edited by nyt on 15 Dec 2014, 17:03)

Thanks a lot ,CrazyBaboon!That was a very useful links you posted.
No. I didn't have luci-app samba but most dependencies are met (I'll double check)
Trying to be more concise--every time I try a network transfer of more than 3 files or over 5gb, it hangs and my network becomes inaccessible.This morning my wife woke me & said nothing was working. WiFi signals were present but no internet on all devices. A reboot fixed it,HOWEVER, my wife's iPhone no longer connects to 5ghz. What's weird is it won't accept the password (like if it were entered wrong)??? The 5 works on other devices and 2.4 still works on her iPhone.Here's my dilemma in a nutshell... I want to install the packages to get samba working but:
1. The luci-app samba adds features in the UI--DOES that mean I can't go back to stock by flashing the stock fw? (Chadster said you can't make changes & go back but still unclear what he meant)??
2. I did install mini dlna (thinking it was needed) does that prevent me from going back?
3. Is the issue I mentioned above consistent with trying to do network transfers over smb? (Which does, for reasons I don't get, work when transferring one file at a time.)
4. And this is maybe the most relevant question but incredibly dumb on my part I didn't wait for an answer...does any or all of this void my warranty?
***Again I want to stress this fw is great. I'm certain the bugs I perceive are my fault. I came to this thinking it was more or less the same out of the box features as stock but with tweaked/optimized settingsthat I have NOT altered.So as far as samba/usb storage I'll either get it working or I won't but you see how I'm stuck? I don't want to take the next step (install dependencies) then possibly have the same or different issues and not be able to go back to stock. If I can get a definitive answer to that I can proceed with a lot more confidence or possibly go back to what was a less exciting experience but stable. Thanks for taking the time CrazyBabon! You really did give me some excellent info I just would feel better about going on after I get those answers... or at least some of them.
***just to clarify, Chadster did NOT say changes couldn't be made. He actually said you can't delete interfaces. I'm fairly confident I didn't though I did hit delete once to erase the previous mount point from before I formatted to ext 4. You know what would make me feel better is knowing I can take this back to the store if something goes wrong. I bought it after thanksgiving and have until Jan 15th. To be clear I wouldn't be buying a different router but just exchanging it. And to be more clear that is absolutely a worst case scenario. I have no real reason to think things could go horribly wrong.
BTW--just reading all of this forum for the first time, I'm a little embarrassed by my kindergarten type questions. There are other more appropriate resources for me. If someone could just help with those questions I think I can start exploring different forums. Is this more of a developers thread? I strongly get that feeling and apologize for all these posts over the past few days.

(Last edited by KLit75 on 15 Dec 2014, 19:13)

is there a current build that is the goto build for development? 

I recently got this model in as an upgrade to my wrt3700 and use it for many of my hosting tools on cod so i need to be able to install openwrt and optware in order to ever really be able to use this router...  wifi is not completely necessary but damn it would be nice since all the wrt3700 had wifi issues... that and this thing has open source plastered on the side of the box (hold off hecklers ive already read enough to know this has been an issue)

just a link to a current build would be nice... i really dont have time to read through 1648 posts as of now

is mcwrt the only go to for development on this... i feel like if that is the case then i should be able to press linksys for a  refund as i only purchased this bleeding edge router because it had open wrt plastered on its side

I ask way more questions than I give answers... But is this what you're looking forhttps://github.com/Chadster766/McWRT/wiki