Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

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Multi-AP. I don’t care about “mesh”, aka wireless uplink, personally, but I do care about the ability to do a competent multiple-AP deployment. Beyond just synchronizing configuration, I consider 802.11k, v and r to be table stakes. And I don’t mean “we use hostapd and you can, in theory, turn it on”. I mean actually deploying multiple instances, using an actual supported, documented and easy configuration, and ending up with a correctly configured network or three that actually work across APs near-optimally. And I should be able to configure and manage this all from one place. Heck, this should be the default configuration.

The fact that OpenWRT can’t do this is why I don’t use it any more. Otherwise I rather like OpenWRT.

There’s an open-source implementation of a WiFi alliance spec for Multi-AP called prpl that’s even based on OpenWRT. I’m sure it’s a mess and supports all manner of undesirable crap, but the good parts could be a good place to start.

That and so much that! Much as I like OpenWRT, it's still quite a pain to cover anything like an older (thick walled) house with more than one floor. I'm about to redo one of those networks as my Christmas holidays project and I dread the day I need to reconfigure the APs.

Of course this possible and working:

https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/roaming

Follow the usteer path.

This seems a bit like saying “want to play pong on your gaming machine? All the groundwork has been laid and you can type apt install gcc. We even package SDL.”

Those docs convince me that someone has tried this and written some software, not that it’s anything like fully supported. Also, the same setup should get 802.11r, not just k and v.

802.11r is useless on a typical home network, as Windows does not implement it for WPA2/WPA3 Personal. It is only useful on WPA2/WPA3 Enterprise networks; sadly, OpenWrt fails at that: https://forum.openwrt.org/t/wpa3-enterprise-with-ft-needs-fi...

I tried usteer on my recent wifi rebuild/updates, and I am for sure sticking with good old DAWN instead. https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/dawn

DAWN wasn't flawless out of box about choosing bands, and would sometimes trash a bit... but it generally worked great for the 3x r7800's I had. And it would generally help band steer people to 5ghz in useful ways.

Usteer has everyone packed onto 2.4GHz. With very rare exception. It just doesn't seem to bandsteer well at all, in my view.

Agreed that this should be a top priority, so so much. Bandsteer and multi-AP are very similar problem-sets; even if users only have a single AP they need good steering to have a good experience. DAWN has started making that a reality (well before usteer) and continues to be the only viable open source option for people right now.

Why not mesh, though?

It works remarkably well in our thick-walled multi-storey house.

Two reasons:

1. It’s a bit orthogonal. APs that support mesh aren’t actually taking their excellent 802.11r/k/v network and making the APs themselves use it by mesh magic. They’re doing something else behind the scenes to arrange for wireless uplink. You can set up OpenWRT to do WDS (I think) and get it to have a wireless uplink. It will be mildly annoying to set up, it will be more manual than it deserves to be, and it won’t help get the actual multi-AP SSID to work any better.

2. I said that I, personally, didn’t care so much. I’ve set up several wireless networks, and I’ve almost never wanted a wireless uplink. I like wires!

OpenWRT probably should have better out of the box support for “mesh,” but IMO that’s a different feature request. I do find it rather annoying that AP makers tend to conflate “mesh” meaning wireless uplink and “mesh” meaning you can use more than one AP, it works well to do so, and it’s not unnecessarily painful to do so.

Something like Aruba Instant On would be awesome...

I’d be fine with just plain Instant where it can group up APs from one master. Instant On would just be icing on the cake.

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