[Cerowrt-devel] Field Report: Switching to bql-31 at home

[Richard Brown <richard.e.brown@dartware.com>]

I tried swapping my WRT54GL/DD-WRT with bql-31 over the weekend. It was a very rocky experience, and I switched back to DD-WRT so that others in my house could use the Internet. Here's what happened:

My home network is 192.168.2.0/24. It's configured to be different from my office (192.168.1.0/24). I also have a couple static IP addresses (printer, file server) at 192.168.2.13 & 192.168.2.23 at home.

I installed bql-31 and then used the sed commands to adjust the advertised subnets to match the addresses at home. I had to manually tweak the printer and file server addresses because they were wireless. I put them in the CeroWrt SSID, 192.168.2.64/27

Performance out to the Internet seemed to be fine, and maybe even snappy. I was not able to do methodical performance testing because several bad things happened:

1) All mDNS detection failed. My local printer (Brother MFC-655CW) is wireless. It was impossible to connect the Mac computers to the printer until I put them into the same SSID/subnet. Then mDNS worked, but required rebooting most equipment (Mac computers & printer) to get it going the first time.

2) I also tried installing mDNSResponder package, but that had no effect on the printer discovery. I didn't configure the package or troubleshoot this...

3) The worst problem was that the OSX computers and the printer all reverted to CeroWrt-guest SSID unbidden. This, of course, screwed up the mDNS, and I couldn't print. In one case, I connected my laptop to the CeroWrt SSID, put the computer to sleep, waited a minute or two, then awakened the computer to find it switched to CeroWrt-guest SSID.

4) I installed the snmpd package. This worked a bit, except that retrieving two interface data samples in quick succession (say, retrieving ifInOctets a few seconds apart) would show a rate of zero between the samples, even if lots of data was really flowing. 30-second samples seemed to work as expected. Does the interface not update the SNMP counters with every packet?

5) I installed fprobe to get NetFlow data. This seemed to be working fine, but was not extensively tested.

Observations:

a) I believe I read about troubles with CeroWrt wireless "dropping out". Could this be related to the switching of SSIDs that I observed? (I did not try Windows or Linux computers on wireless.)

b) mDNS seems to fail when it's routed. I believe there's a provision in the spec for a "mDNS reflector". I also found this link: http://groups.google.com/group/macenterprise/browse_thread/thread/0211bb0a02ef09b6 

c) SNMP counter data was not always reliable, since the counters didn't always seem to be updated.

d) I don't know how different this would be from using a recent OpenWrt on the WNDR3700v2.

What other information could I collect for further debugging? Thanks!

Rich