OpenWrt Forum Archive

Topic: Linksys WRT1900ACS: which image?

The content of this topic has been archived between 30 Mar 2018 and 30 Apr 2018. There are no obvious gaps in this topic, but there may still be some posts missing at the end.

Update on my experience with davids acs image (openwrt-mvebu-armada-385-linksys-shelby-squashfs-factory.img):

Uptime of more than 2 days, no speed drops or wifi disconnections. Internet speed test on wifi 5GHz in ac mode gives me 50+Mbit/s both up and down, my isp plan is 50/50. Internally, depending on the client, up to 1300Mbit/s.

My settings for the 5GHz radio (in case they are relevant for why I'm not experiencing problems in ac mode and others see degradation after 3 hours):

Mode AC
Channel 36
Width 20MHz
Transmit power 20dBm
Country 00
Setup as AP, WMM checked, WPA2-PSK
Distance optimization 15

(Last edited by runev on 5 Jan 2016, 22:56)

anomeome wrote:

@davidc502
Your image has no password by default?

On the first visit to 192.168.1.1 in a browser, LuCi tells you no password is set for root, and you need to set one - enter new password, repeat new password.

Right, forgot about the big orange banner. Not sure what happened here, but resolved.

Just  caught up with all the reading...  @anomeome -- There shouldn't be a password the first time logging on. Not sure what you ran up against, unless previous settings checkbox was ticked? Or there was a problem in the flashing process.

Looks like the problem is resolved anyway.....

by the way, I went ahead and uploaded V2 Cobra and V1 Mamba to the site for anyone who might be interested..

http://personalpages.tds.net/~davidc502/mvebu/

I now have 9 days of uptime without any issues. I've gone about 3 weeks on RC3, so I'm looking forward to shattering the record. lol

Cheers.

(Last edited by davidc502 on 5 Jan 2016, 23:19)

runev wrote:

My settings for the 5GHz radio (in case they are relevant for why I'm not experiencing problems in ac mode and others see degradation after 3 hours):

Will throw out a idea about what may be happening here... Several here have experience on the manufacturing side, and have expressed the idea that these routers are not all the same. Depending on the availability of parts and the price of parts, manufacturers will make changes in "batches". Those changes in hardware aren't supposed to make any difference in performance or reliability, however, the stories we hear where there's a one-off or perhaps a few people, who are experiencing a problem, that no one else has, tends to indicate those "other parts" may be the difference.

It's just a on going idea based on those "gremlins" that seem to affect just a few, but not the whole.

ok, now it is working \o/
anomeome helped me and now it is working!!

thx!

davidc502 wrote:
runev wrote:

My settings for the 5GHz radio (in case they are relevant for why I'm not experiencing problems in ac mode and others see degradation after 3 hours):

Will throw out a idea about what may be happening here... Several here have experience on the manufacturing side, and have expressed the idea that these routers are not all the same. Depending on the availability of parts and the price of parts, manufacturers will make changes in "batches". Those changes in hardware aren't supposed to make any difference in performance or reliability, however, the stories we hear where there's a one-off or perhaps a few people, who are experiencing a problem, that no one else has, tends to indicate those "other parts" may be the difference.

It's just a on going idea based on those "gremlins" that seem to affect just a few, but not the whole.

I suffered on the stock firmware, which the manufacturer should have tested and probably also did. But in a controlled environment.  Different user environments (clients, isp's, physical location etc) gives different outcomes in performance - and the image you provided me with has so far turned out to be great for my router. I have seen more complaints than positive stories about this router and the WRT1900AC. Maybe the people who get a good "out of the box" experience don't tend to write about it - and it's just us few? with problems who do some research and make posts about our experiences? I hope batch differences are not the main cause of issue(s) with this router - and I think the best approach to solve the issues are comparing settings and environments to reduce the number of unknowns to be able to reproduce and reduce problems.
I mean - my stock image worked like shit, which could indicate I got a router from a bad batch. But your image worked great, meaning there is hope for the people still experiencing problems.
I'm lucky I stumbled upon this topic and saw your post, and I really appreciate the info and help you guys have provided. I would be happy to share anything I've done (if anything) if it can help other OpenWrt noobs like myself wink

@runev,

Good points -- Especially with 5Ghz wifi, which environment has a lot to do with. Well, heck 2.4Ghz has a lot of potential interference, so environment can really play a roll in its performance as well.

FYI -- Compared to most around here I'm a noob too, so we do have something in common smile

Cheers,

(Last edited by davidc502 on 6 Jan 2016, 00:32)

Hi davidc502, I am a total openwrt noob but I flashed my cobra with your image and it seems to work great so far (had previously some issues with dd-wrt and the other open wrt image I flashed from arokh didn't work, my devices would not connect to the network for some unknown reasons).
My question is the following, do you have samba and dlna enabled on your image? I can't seem to find it.
Thanks

Samba and Dina is not a part of the build. However, have you opkg update and install those packages?

Wireless transfer speeds...

David, I've flashed your 1900ACS image and was able to set up and attach to the wireless networks.  I'm not getting very good wireless transfer speeds though.  With the Linksys firmware, I'm able to transfer large files across the 2.4 GHz wireless network at speeds of around 21 MB/s (170 Mb/s).  With the OpenWRT firmware, I'm only able to tease around 6 MBps, which is about the same speed I was getting with my old N router.

This is probably more of a general OpenWRT question than a specific 1900ACS question but am I missing a setting in the wireless config to be able to push data across the wifi network faster?

What kind of speeds are you guys getting on the 2.4 radio?  My adapter is just too far from the router to get a solid 5 GHz connection, but again, with the stock firmware on the 2.4 side, I'm able to transfer at much higher speeds than with OpenWRT.

What type of client is being used? Network card?

Have you tried different channels? 1, 6 or 11?  Also, have you messed with the width?

using a realtek 8812AU based adapter.   i've tried many combinations of channels and widths.  i enabled the system log and it was immediately obvious that open wrt isn't quite fully baked for the 1900ACS.  no suprise though since this is new hardware.  i'm anxious to watch the development and maturation of the baseline but for now i'll just stay with the stock firmware.

This image seems much more stable than CC for 2.4 and Ethernet, 5g not so much.  If I have the radio set to auto, it picks channel 36 and the performance is rather poor.  If I set the channel manually, the radio will not come up.

Try a reboot after a manual change (where it doesn't come up on its own). I've noticed the bug since CC RC1, and that's my work around.

Compiling new trunk images with the new wifi driver. The new driver does nothing for performance, but does open up more 5Ghz channels.

Soft reboot has no effect — a power cycled will bring I it up if the channel is auto but not if manually set.

After installing todays's build, I was able to manually select a 5g channel - but it still required a powe cycle.  Performance @ channel 132 maxes out my internet connection 65MB

Awesome! Glad it's working out for you.

btrv wrote:

This image seems much more stable than CC for 2.4 and Ethernet, 5g not so much.  If I have the radio set to auto, it picks channel 36 and the performance is rather poor.  If I set the channel manually, the radio will not come up.

I had this exact same problem.  If I chose channel 40, I was sometime able to get the radio to initialize, sometimes not.  I should have saved some of the logging output.

Hey there everyone,

im just following this thread vigilant, since i'm rather unhappy with the performance of the router. Just bought i yesterday and tried first with the stock-firmware. On the first tries on speedtest.net it was very promising, since i got the my full isp speed at 120mbit, but after an hour or two it was around 50-60Mbit.

Thankfully, i thought, there is still openwrt around (had it on my old TP-Link 1043nd already installed, which i wanted to replace) and i installed the last snapshot. But unfortunately the same game. At the beginning at works as intended, but after a while the speed just drops to around 50Mbit.

I almost resigned to my fate, but today i have a new problem that the router responds very slow to new connections (e.g. browsing the a new website). You can see that on a speedtest as well, initial ping at around 200 (usually 20). (tried the old 1043nd, no problems here - same channel, same channel bandwith, same openwrt snapshot)

So you guys think those problems will be fixed in the near future? otherwise i'll send it back since 240Euro for this pice of crap is way too much.

@davidc502: i currently have your build installed. but i have a problem installing kmod-fs-ntfs. The dependency kernel coudn't be installed due i version missmatch

* satisfy_dependencies_for: Cannot satisfy the following dependencies for kmod-fs-ntfs:
*     kernel (= 4.1.13-1-8f73c8e82cbb1a7fab32432cc61f0b15) *
* opkg_install_cmd: Cannot install package kmod-fs-ntfs.

(Last edited by rezss on 10 Jan 2016, 16:21)

Yes, known issue. You will need to force the install. The kernels are the same.

opkg --force-depends install kmod-fs-ntfs

Try the following settings on either 2.4 and or 5ghz.  You may do a little research about these settings and tweak them to what's best in your area.

Advanced Settings (Under Wifi)

Fragmentation Threshold = 2346
RTC/CTS Threshold = 500

(Last edited by davidc502 on 10 Jan 2016, 16:50)

Hi David, i instal your image and all work fine, thank you for this!!! I have only one question, how i can use DLNA? In original software i use my linksys and like nas server with my HDD, on linksys was Twonky serer. Please can you help me to instal DLNA?