Matthias' personal blog

OpenWrt on a TP-Link TL-WR1043N/ND v3

Posted December 5th 2016

Getting this to work was surprisingly rough. I ran into trouble with OpenWrt versions, broken old config and interface name confusion. But it's nice now that it works.

Firmware update

The current (2016-12) stable version of OpenWrt is "Chaos Calmber 15.05.1". That version has support for v1 and v2 of my access point, but not v3. According to one page I found, you can hack (by editing one byte) the v2 image to install it on a v3 device, but that seemed too risky. I installed a daily snapshot from a few days back instead.

I did the install via the CLI, using 'scp' to copy the file to /tmp and 'sysupgrade' to do the install.

LUCI

Snapshots don't include LUCI, the browser UI. So I installed that with 'opkg update' and 'opkg install luci'.

Old/Broken settings

Both before and after upgrading, the wired interfaces on the access point worked fine but the wireless was 'disabled' no matter what I did. I couldn't figure out what was wrong and ended up re-installing the firmware via LUCI and unchecking the 'retain settings' box. After that, wireless worked.

Guest wireless

Mostly for fun, I set up an unencrypted guest network alongside my regular network. I did that entirely in LUCI. I put it in its own network, 'guest_nw'. To get that talking to the outside world, I had to add forwarding to the 'wan'.

I also installed 'SQM QOS', i.e. 'opkg install ...' and limited the bandwidth for the guest network. It's a bit tricky to figure out which 'interface name' relates to which wireless network, in my case it was 'wlan0-1'.

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