So I'm working on "build 2" of a WRT3200ACM.  The first time around I went with LEDE stable from June to experiment a bit.  This time I'm going to dial it in a bit more.  I have a laundry list of questions ranging from ACM specifics that davidc helped with in the earlier thread, to general choice questions, to one specific implementation question that's more of a Linux networking question.  Hopefully some people will be able to help with a few pieces.

1) WRT3200: Would you guys recommend stable + the latest mwlwifi driver, or going with the latest snapshot on the 3200?  I normally avoid snapshots in distros after spending waaaay too many years on Debian Sid and getting burned over and over. But since this is a work in progress it's a viable question.

2) WRT3200: I know davidc told me the other day that MU-MIMO is unsupported with no map for it....ugg!  But I'm curious if band shaping is currently supported?  I know LEDE defaults to the same SSID for all radios, but I don't know if that's because it picked up on the band shaping, or if it just defaults for murky "get one of the other randomly" setups.  For now I'm separating the frequencies, but that's so messy.

3) OpenWRT: Bandwith/traffic monitoring.  vnstats, and collectd/rrd seem to get wiped upon reboot.  Yet those are the bandwith (and other stats) logging tools that have a nice Luci snap-in for viewing the stats.  Is there any way to configure either or both of these to persistently store the metrics so they don't get wiped on reboot?

4) OpenVPN:  Might be a question for the OpenVPN forums, but I figure the routing part is OpenWRT: How would I be able to route specific clients and/or ports direct to the wan, bypassing a VPN?  I'd like to get a little more sophisticated in how I route around my VPN, which is one of the big things I wanted to play with OpenWRT more with.  I've used OpenWRT for years but only surface level and would like to use it for some heavy lifting with this capable router!

I'm going to post a separate thread for the more general Linux networking questions. I was going to put it here but I fear it would take this off topic.

• Roll you own, master works well usually, or stable; latest mwlwifi is of interest if there is an issue resolution of concern.

• iirc Some rudimentary support was added to hostapd, but actuall support in LEDE was not yet there; daemon count????

• Checkout this, can collect elsewhere (down pipe)iirc

• This maybe, and this may be of interest, which is also supported.

1) I am running trunk quite stable on my 3200acm. If it is better or worse than the stable release I don't know. But AFAIK, "stable" for LEDE doesn't have the same meaning as "stable" in Debian. While in Debian, stable is the result of a long process (soft freeze, hard freeze, RC bugs, ...), in LEDE is appears to me a quite shorter process and more or less just a snapshot of trunk.

3) For vnstat, there is an option in /etc/vnstat.conf to set the location of the database file: DatabaseDir. If you set this to some persitant storage, the database should survive a reboot. I set mine to an external usb. I'm worried constant writes to the router's storage would be that great in the long run.

Thanks!   Sounds like band shaping isn't going to be happening for a while.  Do you typically keep your 2.4/5 frequencies as separate SSIDs or rely on luck of picking the right one and give them the same SSID?

Netdata is gorgeous! Wow.  Though it doesn't seem to show anything the other stats tools don't already show, it just does it prettier.  I was hoping for bandwidth history display by month, etc, that survives reboots more than real-time graphs.

I'll look into the tunnel routing docs, thanks.  I looked at WireGuard....I'll have to do some translation in my head on how to set that up if I try it though.

One additional question: On build #1 with the old driver (stable) after I enabled the VPN, ethernet used it, but wifi bypassed it and went to wan.  After a reboot (and many more) it's been fine ever since.  On build 2 however, no matter how many reboots I do, wireless still bypasses the vpn and goes to wan.  I suspect using the new driver is the issue.  I tried setting gateway metric higher on wan/wan6, but it hasn't helped.  Any idea how to make sure wireless uses the VPN/tun0?

Thanks for the config option!  I'll have to consider a  USB, I hadn't considered flash writing.  Though I figured if Cradlepoint and some of the rack based routers keep static logs, it can't be all bad.

I just use different SSIDs, but my WLAN needs are not intensive.

I used to use Collectd/rrd and stuff data out to a USB thumb, but abandoned that quite some time back. There are a lot of plugins for Netdata and I thought there were some that would allow collecting historical data, could be wrong. This is now in the packages feeds, you can probably achieve your desired outcome by putting database somewhere. I no longer collect historical data.

Build #1 current stable? #2 a master snapshot? or is change only the mwlwifi version? Although I don't think either would change anything regarding what you are describing. Sounds like a configuration issue in:
    /etc/config/wireless
or possibly the config for OpenVPN, but I don't use OpenVPN.

Thanks again.

Both build #1 and #2 are using stable for now, but #2 has the updated driver you recommended.  All I can think of is maybe the wireless interface is coming up before the VPN is established due to improved efficiency in the driver, and that's causing an issue.

One reboot put the wifi behind the vpn.  The next did not.  There's definitely a timing issue of some sort where wireless is grabbing the gateway before the tun0 is setup.

Edit: What's weird is that both the wireless and wired are just part of eth0/br-lan.  What's applying to one should be applying to the other, but that's not the case.

(Last edited by tux-o-matic on 28 Aug 2017, 22:02)

If there is a race condition you could try adding:

sleep 1
wifi up

just before the exit 0 in file /etc/rc.local to see if it resolves issue.

For some reason the problem mysteriously disappeared without needing to add the delay.  *shrug*.  I did update the mwl driver on build #1 as well, and haven't experienced the problem with wifi not being tunneled.

You're an absolute wizard with knowing the packages available!  I think nlbwmon is pretty much what I was looking for!  vnstat with the save setting might do the trick too, but nlbwmon is more or less more useful with it's genuine archiving and per-mac breakdown.  Thanks!  I'll keep using netdata for realtime checking as well, which is especially useful for the openvpn-policy testing.

I really love the idea of the OpenVPN policy-based-routing setup as well, though I admit, I can't seem to get it to actually DO anything.  I'm not sure if I've set it up wrong or it just doesn't work currently (I presume there's a reason it's not part of the standard repository at this point.)   My main test is just configuring youtube.com;youtu.be to use the wan instead of the VPN since there's no need for video to be tunneled, and it's a good test to watch the data in netdata, and so far, no matter what, everything still goes through the tunnel.  I'll have to keep playing with that as I'd love for it to work. Issue might just be the test case, as it's possible video streams don't actually appear as coming from youtube.com but are instead p2p.