How to WiFi Mesh on OpenWRT (Multy M1)

this is a very important note just so you don't create a loop in your network only the main mesh node can be wired into your network the rest of the nodes or satellites need to be Wi-Fi only do not Loop the satellites back into your main network using a network cable you can plug things into the back of the satellites like Xboxes PC cameras and other things but do not plug the satellit back into the original Network because it will just create a broadcast Loop and network will stop working unlike the zxl mesh firmware which tries to identify whether it should be using Wi-Fi or ethernet for the network back hall the 802.11s function on open wrrt does not do this and will just create a network loop hello everyone this is a video on how to use openwrt in a wireless mesh configuration with these zxl multi m M1 devices otherwise known as model number wsm2 uh these things I have found to be phenomenally unreliable in their zxl stock configuration if you look in the description of this video there is a video on how to take off the stock firmware on these devices and put on uh openwrt and once you've done that they will just be individual routers on their own so individual ethernet routers uh or you could use them as I guess an access point where they're all wired back to uh Central wide network but if you wanted to recreate the meshing function um that the zxl software or firmware had where you can have a main one plugged into your main router and then these other ones in other places around the house where you don't have uh Network connectivity or an ethernet cable and you wanted to pick up the Wi-Fi signal and transmit it again um this video will show you how to do that using a function that's built into open wrt called 802.11s for Sierra um the configuration I will use will have this essentially the main one and I will have it configured as the uh as a Bridge or essentially an access point only with meshing enabled uh if you wanted to have this as your main router so you can use open wrrt that's already on this now as the rooting operating system then what you need to do is ignore the uh IP address and DHCP and IPv6 settings that I will change on this main router right what I'm going to do is move the video around so that you've got the screenshot of my laptop and also hopefully this uh video where you can see what I'm plugging in on these devices so the far right hand one will be my main one middle one will be the the first hop or the first node in the mesh and the far one will be another node in the mesh as well so back of the first one in the WAN Port I have my internet connection which is this yellow cable that goes into the lowest Port the W port and then uh this white cable goes off from one of the three remaining Lan ports to my laptop on the laptop because we are in rooted mode so this is where if you um didn't want to have it as a bridge and you wanted to use it as a router um it's on 1 192.168.1.1 and what I would like to have let me bring up another command prompt here are these devices to be on My Lan my main Lan range of 10. n.n and they're going to be on 10. n.n. 40 do 41 and 42 so by the end of this video we should have uh all three of these um remaining ping boxes should be responding to pings so let's go over to the web browser and do 192.168.1.1 whoops might have I can type properly and we bring up the first devices open wrt interface if you followed my other video on installing the open wrt software you probably will already have um these to that entry there and that entry there will be enabled because you will have enabled Wi-Fi so I'm going to mimic that setup and call that my home network when I my home Wi-Fi and under security I will give it WPA 2 because I definitely have some devices that do not like WPA 3 in the house and I'm going to give it the password um Oliver 0 I'll also do the same for the fight that's for the 2.4 GHz up there I'm going to do exactly the same for the 5 GHz so at this point once I press on enable we will be uh on both of those we will be um in the same situation as the the kind of stock setup um of how my uh firmware flashing video of open wrt onto these is um right now we can connect to my home Wi-Fi with a password alliver 90 it will go into this it'll go off onto the internet with that yellow cable because I have a a wider bigger Lan I do want these to be into bridge mode so uh if you do not want bridge mode do not follow this next set of instructions and I'll tell you when I'm done uh with that so I'm going to go into Network and then interfaces going to click on edit On Lan and I'm going to give it a static IP address of 10.0.0 40 I'm going to change the subnet mask um CU I have a wider subnet mask and go to DHCP server ignore this interface because I don't want this to be handing out DHCP on my landan because I already have a DHCP server also under IPv6 settings I need to go into ra service and change that to disabled and IPv6 uh dhcpv6 service I also need to set to disabled because again I already have IPv6 on My Lan being uh routin announced and dhcpd Via another device on my network so I do not want that to be uh occurring on my plan I will save that and I will then save and apply socket it now needs to be plugged into the Lan socket uh I now need to move the connections around so so that is what I've just moved it over to my laptop is now able to Ping the main uh access point on the mesh node on 10.40 so back to the web browser I now need to visit that IP address and log back in now we are on to the configuration of the mesh Network so if um if you had skipped or you were skipping that step because you wanted it to be a router still rather than a uh Bridge or just an access point now at this point you need to start following my instructions again to do the mesh node we can have the mesh back hall on the 2.4 GHz but that will restrict your speed you will want to add it on this second option here the ACX uh n network which is the 5 GHz which will give you quicker back haul we need to so we've already configured our home Wi-Fi network of my uh home Wi-Fi and the password Oliver 90 we now need to click on actually will take a note of that just before I start because I'm highly likely to forget that that's the name we now need to click on add on this uh 5 GHz line and scroll down where it says mode access point we need to add an 802.11s mode Network and we need to give that Network an ID nobody sees this ID when um looking at a list of wireless networks it's like the hidden back hall ID that allows all of these three devices to talk to each other and you could have another three of these devices somewhere else in the house with a different mesh ID and they would all talk to each other and they wouldn't uh cross talk across both of them so you can use the mesh ID uh to be something unique which will be your um network ID that these use to organize eles so I'm going to call this one um random mesh ID uh 4445 54 G ghj okay basically any word that nobody else in the area is likely to be using and I'm going to take a note of that because I will need that when I come to configure the other ones by default it will not be bound to any of the network ports so we need to go where it says Network and tick Lan which will bind it to uh or allow the traffic to flow to the Lan um and then out onto the network also you probably want to go into the wireless security and change it from being no encryption to being wpa3 SAE uh you won't be able to select WPA2 you'll get a big warning about it not being supported um so wpa3 SAE and then give it a good secure password because if somebody knows your mesh ID or can sniff it uh you will want a good wpa3 password so that people can't just join their own nodes to your network so I'm just going to match the keyboard which is probably as random as it can be and we can now save that Network so you'll see underneath the 5 G gz entry here we now have our home Wi-Fi network which you'll be able to see in the list of wireless networks we've also got this mesh Network which we are about to uh save the settings on to enable that so save and apply so what we've got now is this configured as a bridge or as a essentially an access point only with a mesh node on it and my wireless network called my home Wi-Fi I'm now going to move my network cable for my laptop from the one I've now finished configuring onto the first node that I or the I guess maybe the second node or the first satellite that I would like to configure so the white network cable off to my laptop comes out and I'll plug it into any of the three upper network sockets on this note um you could do this on the other side of your house these just happen to all be next to each other for the ease of filming um yeah there's no reason why you'd need to uh have them all next to each other to configure them initially now I'm plugged in it's responding on 192.168.1.1 which is the factory default of this we need to log into it and because again it's just going to be exactly the same as whoops it's going to be exactly the same as this was in factory mode so we need to turn off the DHCP and we need to turn off the IPv6 um router announcements so we need to go into interface or network and then interfaces edit on the Lan this is my first of the satellites so I'm going to give that 10.41 again my custom subnet and onto DHCP server ignore the interface and IPv6 settings needs to be ra mode disabled and dhcpv6 service disabled save on that note that we will still be responding on 1.1 until I click on Save and apply I'm going to change all of the other wireless settings as well and then we will apply the uh the settings oops so Network and then Wireless once again I need to configure my home network onto this so I need to click on the 2.4 edit scroll down call that one my home Wi-Fi go to wireless security WPA2 for this all 90 save click on edit on the 5 GHz entry as well same whoops that didn't copy same details on that one and before I again save and apply all of this I am going to add the mesh node as well so I need to click on add on the on that 5 GHz section here the second section down need to click on ADD scroll down where it's got access point as the mode change that to 802.11s and then we need to fill in the same details that we filled in on the main node so that's the uh name of it I need to associate it with the Lan and under wireless security we need to change that to wpa3 SAE and give it the same exact key or password and then click on Save I think we're now ready to save and apply that I noticed that it's gone a bit weird and doubled up this 5 GHz one it's a bit unusual I'm going to click on enable and just see whether stuff uh stuff works as expected so when I click on enable here that's the same as scrolling down and also clicking save and apply um so let's see what happens I'm going to click on enable now and we' expect it to stop responding on 1.1 and I I would hope that soon after I will see a response from 41 which is the IP address I gave uh this node that I'm plugged into and indeed now through the wireless network so these two are not wired into the same network the only cable that is in the back of this one here is the cable off to my laptop this is now talking wirelessly to this node here and then off to the rest of the inter so if I uh ping the internet I now have internet access hopping uh Network into the this wi-fi over to this and off onto the internet we now need to configure the third and final node and then you could just repeat this process for each of the uh nodes that you want to add I'm not sure what the maximum that you can have is but um if somebody does find out out let me know so we can now unplug from this middle node and plug into the final one any of the upper three network sockets on the back of it that's plugged in and we should see that um we will be responding on 192.168.1.1 because once again this third and final one is uh all back into default settings so it will again need all of that initial setup that I did um before so I need to go network interfaces On LAN click on edit I need to give it the final IP address 42 submit mask of 255 25525 4.0 and that's only because I have a larger IP space on my network most people you w won't want to change that uh DHCP server we want to ignore the interface and uh IPv6 routing an uh no IPv6 settings disabled on the ra service and disabled on dhcpv6 off to wireless so Network and then Wireless and the same process we did with the uh middle router we need to do on this one click on edit on the 2.4 GHz give it my wireless network name and the desired password and again on the 5 GHz edit on that one my network name and the desired password and now we're on to the meshback call so I want to add the meshback call on the 5 GHz once again scroll down change the mode to 802.11s fill in the mesh ID go over to wireless security and once again make sure that we select or fill in exactly the same as or what we filled in on the other one so wpa3 SAE and save and I think we're ready to go weirdly this middle one hasn't sorry this final one hasn't added or duplicated that um that entry there probably because I clicked on edit a second time or something and it it messed up the um the gooey so as I say clicking on Save and apply is going to do exactly the same as clicking on enable on this one except when I click on enable it will also enable that that Wi-Fi name so um I'm going to click on enable um if you do look down this list once you've set them all up and one of these um is set to disabled um you will want to click on it enable because it means that it won't be transmitting on that band so it might not be transmitting on the 2.4 um so yeah enable and here it goes let's see uh whether we end up with all three online and access to the internet so 1.1 has stopped responding and I'm going to start pinging the internet that one doesn't appear to have worked as smoothly as the others I will unplug my network cable and plug it back in just in case uh for some reason my laptop hasn't refreshed its IP address no well that one has not worked as well H some impromptu troubleshooting time so I need to go into the network settings and force an IP address so that I'm actually then able to get back into the web interface of this um router so let's do 10. do oops check that the IP address I want to use is actually free yep I can use 39 on my network and I don't need a Gateway or DNS cuz I'm only going to access this rout very temporarily so we can see we've got a response from the reconfigured final node but for some reason we we do not have back call to the rest of the network let's try and figure out why that might be so let's go Network and wireless so interestingly in the status it is able to see and even report on the other two nodes being available um and it's communicating with one of them but I'm not sure why I'm not getting any traffic oh have I here we go so this is a very easy mistake to make I think what I've done here if I go into edit on this uh mesh node entry I've forgotten to associate it with Lan is what I hope I have done yes here we go so Network is unspecified I need that to be part of my Lan Network save scroll down save and apply and almost certainly that will have been my issue there we go so there you could see in the web interface that the physical radio layer was uh connected and could see the other nodes but I was not able to access the uh the n work across it because I hadn't uh bound it or Associated it with the Lan it was just a floating um mesh connectivity that didn't know where it was supposed to pass traffic so you know data was coming in on the Wi-Fi and would go nowhere and data that was coming in on the network into this node here would also not go out on that wireless mesh node so we're now good we have access to the internet and I can ping all three of these open wrt multi M1 Wireless uh mesh nodes so that's quite a good result so what I could now do is unplug my laptop and plug it directly into the the first node again and then these two I can unplug and move them around the house put them into another location um make sure that that location is midpoint between where you want good uh reception and where your rout already is you don't want to put it all the way really far away because you will be picking up and repeating a really bad low signal um you will want yeah midpoint so it's picking up a good signal and repeating uh a good signal um the other things that are good to know is if you are for example in the UK and you have buring media uh this router this main one here uh with open WR on it will be infinitely more capable reliable and better than the Virgin Media router um so you would want to put your Virgin Media rout into bridge mode and then on this one uh on the main one you would leave this in rooting mode so that um you have a very good competent router rather than the Virgin Media router um and that will just become a a bridge between the cable network and um and this router doing sensible routing and natat and configuration and Port forwards and and everything else if you didn't watch the entire video on putting open wrrt on this or if you've done it using the instructions on the open wrt website I would advise looking at the end of my video on how to put open wrrt on it because if you've got a gigabit broadband service your speed will probably be limited to around 700 or 800 megabits per second unless you've gone into the uh open wrrt admin firewall pages and enabled software and potentially Hardware offload which will improve the performance of your uh internet hopefully that video has been really helpful to you if it has it would be really helpful to me if you wouldn't mind subscribing to my YouTube channel you don't need to have the video notifications switched on but the subscriber numbers really do help thanks very much

Channel: icannotgetafreename

Views: 1,110

Keywords:

Id: KmSKCE1QHK4

Length: 27min 23sec (1643 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 28 2023