Hi there,
I've been happily using OpenWrt for about 5-6 years now with several devices, though I do lack fundamental Linux CLI skills. I have been using a few different D-Link devices over the years and more recently a TP-Link WDR4300 all with great success with OpenWrt.
I finally saved up money for a TP-Link Archer C7 (v2) and bought it today brand new. It had an older firmware from 2014, therefore I was not worried about firmware being blocked. I confirmed that hardware version is 2.
The TP-Link web interface accepted the OpenWrt firmware (openwrt-15.05.1-ar71xx-generic-archer-c7-v2-squashfs-factory.bin) successfully and restarted without any issues.
From this point, I was not able to access the OpenWrt web interface at 192.168.1.1 or any other potential addresses. I cannot ping 192.168.1.1 or any other familiar addresses either.
From Windows ipconfig /all:
Ethernet adapter Ethernet:
Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : C4-54-44-F1-6A-AD
DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes
Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes
Autoconfiguration IPv4 Address. . : 169.254.141.53(Preferred)
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.0.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . :
NetBIOS over Tcpip. . . . . . . . : Disabled
As you can see, it is auto-assigning a strange IP that I am not familiar with. I have never experienced this during my past 5-6 years with OpenWrt. So I tried pinging 169.254.141.1, 169.254.1.1, etc., etc. with no success.
I did several searches here at the OpenWrt forum for 169.254 and found the following similar results:
https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=65302
https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=65270
https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=65017
I am familiar with using SCP client WinSCP for managing my OpenWrt routers. However, in this case, I don't know what IP address to use to access the router now.
Some of those similar search results suggested that one user may have plugged the ethernet cable into WAN port instead of the LAN ports. But in my case, I've been using LAN port 1 throughout flashing, etc. I also tried ruling out a bad LAN port and tried switching to LAN port 2 and rebooting the router, but no success.
I have tried holding down the Reset button for 10+ seconds to restore factory defaults but no luck.
One of those search results suggests that the user "Missed option network 'lan' for ap" and that solved one users issue with these strange 169.254.x.x IP addresses. Surely that might even resolve my issue. However, I don't know how to access the router through SCP right now to make that modification to the network settings. Nor do I know how why this issue would have occurred after flashing OpenWrt as I have done so for 5-6 years now following the same steps.
So I am hoping that somebody can help me to resolve this issue and also let me know what might have caused this problem so that I can avoid it happening again.
I used bullet points to highlight some of the pertinent information to help narrow it down a bit.
Thank you for your time. I appreciate any assistance that I can get.
(Last edited by WildByDesign on 15 Jun 2016, 15:12)