DIY MESH WiFi with batman-adv and OpenWrt

[@OneMarcFifty]

Please visit my channel page: kzbin.info Want to talk to me? Join my Discord Server: discord.com/invite/DXnfBUG

[@stephendetomasi1701]

Hey Marc, where have you been? It's been a while!

[@Andrew-by5yo]

I can't imagine how much time you invested in the production of this video, but your efforts are very appreciated. First class video as usual.

[@OneMarcFifty]

Yeah - this one was a lot of work! But - you know - I made it because I _really_ wanted to make it. I doubt that it will get more than 5000 views but it is aimed at the core community of my channel - I know there are many of you who wanted to get into mesh and batman etc. ;-)

[@primegamer321]

@@OneMarcFifty congrats marc! you surpassed your 5000 expected views. Also thanks for the videos you always post in this channel, it's always a learning material for dummies like me.

[@OneMarcFifty]

@@primegamer321 Yes - I was (positively) surprised by the number of views! Many thanks ;-)

[@hbkhum]

@onemarcfifty tengo una pregunta sobre cómo configurar el nodo híbrido (ethernet y wifi), vi tu video y mencionas un poco de respeto con VLAN, pero lo intenté y no funcionó, ¿cómo lo resuelves?

[@djstraussp]

I've just bought 3 Asus Lyras for a killer price only to replicate this awesome tutorial, OpenWRT learning curve will skyrocket. Great content, I appreciate your efforts to build this content.

[@Mikesco3]

This channel is super underrated!!! People pay a lot of money for the features he listed here and here it is done in s freedom respecting way.

[@infinitelylarge]

This is one of the most helpful KZbin videos I've ever watched. I just got my mesh up and running. I can't imagine how hard it would have been without this video. Thank you so much. You're amazing! :-)

[@yorksun02]

Marc, the batman vlan seems to have a performance penalty. If I brige bat0 without using vlan to my LAN on both sides, it works with reasonable speed. But if I bridge bat0.99 to my LAN on both sides, it works but the bandwidth drops about 2/3. Any idea why and how to fix this?

[@axiom1652]

Hi Marc, you made me reconsider mesh and actually go for fast roaming. I am so glad that I stumbled over your channel and all your great videos. I already use OpenWRT since more than a decade now but never explored it over standard features. Thanks a lot for all the work and keep going ;-) In diesem Sinne viele Grüße aus Dänemark ;-)

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hey, many thanks for the feedback ;-) I've heard similar feedback from quite some users - long term users of OpenWrt who have it "just running" - because that's what it does, right - it just works ;-) But Wifi has made so much progress with AC, AX, 802.11r and the like - at some point I thought "Let me see what we can get out of it" ;-) Greetings from Germany !

[@carlosfagomes]

very cool, Marc, and thanks for your work on providing luci support for the batman-adv proto. it will surely make the protocol accessible to a wider audience. if you don't mind, i'll add a reference to your video on my mesh tutorial.

[@OneMarcFifty]

Please do so!

[@OneMarcFifty]

PS - your tutorials on cgomesu.com/blog/Mesh-networking-openwrt-batman/ have helped me a lot - many thanks for that!!!

[@tracnunya7165]

YES! I now have 8 units meshed to my router THANKS

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hey, that's awesome! Many thanks for sharing.

[@ProfiteerMusic]

Can we get an updated video or writeup of this tutorial? I'd love to implement this in my home setup, but I've been coming across a LOT of issues with implementation and, unfortunately, can't find much documentation out there (especially on the github page).

[@Blewis-Diarrheo]

I really appreciate these videos, even though in most all cases, I'll never need to do this in my 120 square meter flat with my single Belkin RT3200 running OpenWRT. Networking is really not my area, but I totally understand needing to do something for one's own edification, and that's why this channel is wholeheartedly satisfying.

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi, many thanks ;-)

[@richchase3140]

At 13:36, sooo humble. Folks, "it's new" because Marc created it. Thanks, and thanks again for this great video!

[@OneMarcFifty]

Thanks mate - I thought it would be „fishing for compliments“ if I had pointed it out ;-)

[@jkobain]

Decided to check if my router supports OpenWRT, and it actually now does! Will certainly try B.A.T.M.A.N., to see how good it works. Thank you!

[@gasparem16]

yet again. Incredible quality and detailed videos. Completely underated channel. Thank you for the hard work (Y)

[@OneMarcFifty]

Thank you very much !

[@MasterVader510]

Awesome, I've been waiting for your next video to come out. Thanks man!

[@OneMarcFifty]

Thanks a lot mate !

[@hegjon]

Thanks for the high quality content, I will look into this setup for my neighborhood

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi Jonny, many thanks for the feedback - let me know how it goes ;-)

[@dexterfranco6450]

Thank you so much Marc for making this tutorial, it helped me setting up my EA8300 mesh easily. I hope you will cover more advanced functions of the BATMAN adv in the future. Many thanks.

[@smziaee]

Thank you very much dear teacher. I will try to make an Advanced Batman mesh with your complex lessons.

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi, that's great - please let us know how it goes !

[@AwesomeOpenSource]

Tremendously great as always! I'd love to see your take on Openwisp and how it might pay off in the effort to setup something like this, vs. the manual method of touching each AP individually.

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi many thanks mate! Yes - Openwisp is great if you want to roll out and/or maintain many devices (I’d say 10 or more…) It’s kind of the “LuCI of LuCIs” - why am I not using it? Because I have ansible… Ansible is more flexible for me because I can manage anything that has ssh. But if you have a big park of OpenWrt devices then Openwisp would definitely be a good choice

[@AwesomeOpenSource]

@@OneMarcFifty I got some of those Asus Lyra Mesh - any advice on how to successfully flash them? I've tried the instructionson the wiki for openwrt, but no luck. I've got one in recovery mode now, and no windows pc to deal with it...ugh.

[@jeronimo3054]

Just fantastic! I will implement thins in my building! Congrats!

[@OneMarcFifty]

Thank you!

[@jairunet]

Excellent Marc, this is awesome, and as you mentioned, will be interesting to see the difference in the fast roaming feature if combining the 2.4 and 5 GHz in the networks sharing the same ESSID, all sorts of optimizations that you mentioned have not been tested yet, in addition, I think will be great to find wireless tools similar to those Unifi wireless devices have "design center" who can give you a map of the coverage for each AP, proximity and coverage, conflict of channels number and width capacities, again great technical details and deep understanding that can then be looked deeper with other tools such "netspot" for android or "iwifi" for ios, I look forward to setting up a small mesh myself and let you know how it went, until the next video, take care and thank you!

[@OneMarcFifty]

Thank you very much jairu, keep us posted ;-)

[@AaAa-zf2tf]

How can i do that when my main router is mikrotik?

[@ricardobadilla2372]

Great video, as always, a lot of useful information!

[@OneMarcFifty]

Many thanks Ricardo!

[@ivanov83]

Thank you for a great work. Very clear and professional explanation

[@OneMarcFifty]

Many thanks Pavel!

[@jerome-9732]

Thank you for your video. You describe exactly what I was looking for. But I’ve got only one regret, the devices you use are not available in Switzerland. It’s difficult to find in the hardware list of openwrt a router or ap tri band with wifi 6 compatible with mesh and easy to install openwrt in.

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi Jérôme, can‘t you get the Belkin RT3200?

[@cokegen]

Mind-Blown and subscribed !!! Now I'll need to find me a month to digest all of this ...

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hey, thanks a lot - let me know how things go ;-)

[@GRODT_TWH]

Wow, why didn't I find our detailed videos before. Great video! thanks

[@OneMarcFifty]

Thanks mate!

[@stephendetomasi1701]

Word of warning about 21:15 - some devices include MAC addresses as part of backups (at least my YouHua WR1200JS did on 19.07.3) which can really cause some chaos. Otherwise awesome video Marc, top stuff!

[@OneMarcFifty]

Oh - very true! Thanks for pointing this out! Guys, if you have changed MAC addresses and ran a backup then change them back after the restore to a new device. Many thanks Stephen!

[@tracnunya7165]

i cloned about 20 extenders using the backup from one and only had to alter the name afterwards, all are working fine

[@unknown_channel_name]

You explained it really well. Someone with zero knowledge can also setup a mesh network using these tutorials.

[@OneMarcFifty]

Thank you very much

[@DisasterousRDX]

Thanks Mark for your content. This is very helpful!

[@dougbarry8399]

Great work Marc!

[@OneMarcFifty]

Thank you !

[@jwild1979]

Your videos have helped me understand VLAN so much better. Thank you! I have a question about the batman protocol, If my "dumb switch" can not do VLAN, but the guest and IOT have the same SSID names as my main switch, would that traffic transfer into the firewall zones? Or am I just giving everything from the second WiFi access point full access now anyway? It is running AsusWRT Merlin, but there is no VLAN options in the GUI. I guess there are coding ways to add it, but nobody who explains these things quite as well as you, to where I understand it.

[@tracnunya7165]

odhcpd - if you turn this off, you will spend a week trying to find out why any windows shares run 120 times slower when you are connected via an extender wifi versus the router wifi :) . I do have dnsmasq and firewall disabled on the extenders and so far so good. also, consider running the batmesh on one radio, (2.4 or 5) and the other wifi on the opposite radio, my transfer speeds copying a 1 gig video file from my share when connected to an extender went up 300% by running the mesh on one radio and the other interface on the opposing radio.

[@tracnunya7165]

router and MLD multicast listener if you turn off IP6 everywhere and delete the IPv6 ULA-Prefix, and delete the ip6wan, you MUST leave Enable IPv6 checked as true in the br lan or the MLD will never come up, after days of testing :) LOGFILE batman_adv: bat0: No MLD Querier present - multicast optimizations disabled followed by (if ip6 enabled on br lan .. and maybe other vlan bridges as well i did not test them) LOGFILE batman_adv: bat0: MLD Querier appeared MY SHARE TRANSPORT RATE IS 120 TIMES SLOWER IF NO MLD

[@OneMarcFifty]

Thanks for sharing!

[@victorpublic]

Hey Marc, when I disable Fragmentation in the Mesh Routing tab - batman device setting I get double the performance, can you explain why? Also, please consider making a dedicated video about MTU because it is one of the most confusing thing about homelab network configuration

[@basheerolakara]

professional and detailed videos .... thank from India

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi, many thanks for the friendly feedback.

[@junewinter4705]

Hi Marc, you might like to double check the reason for disabling "Forward mesh peer traffic" at 27:26 of the video. I believe that is supposed to disable 802.11s own HWMP protocol (so batman-adv can be used instead), it is not related to the OLSR protocol (which is a different mesh technology using IP addresses). BTW, thanks for making great videos that bring technology to masses.

[@sirdewd2197]

Can you do a video on how you flashed your Asus routers?

[@OneMarcFifty]

Unfortunately no - because it's already done. Can't do it again. In a nutshell I connected to the serial interface and transferred the Image over TFTP. Also keep in mind that the Lyra's need a bit more config work for the integrated switch: forum.openwrt.org/t/asus-lyra-map-ac2200-vlan-and-multiple-ssids-support/78822/3

[@IAmMan-]

Great video Marc! I can see you spent a lot of time and effort on this. Also thanks for luci-proto-batman-adv! If I can criticize anything is that you maybe should experiment with microphone placement and/or sound editing. The gulping/swallowing sounds undelicate to say the least. It’s in all your videos and they do take a bit away from the overall quality.

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi, many thanks for the feedback - I have received it a couple of times. The problems started when I bought that new Lavalier Mike. It really picked up every single noise. In the mean time I have added noise filters - should be fixed. Also - I tried to manically prevent jump cuts (and hence didn't cut audio at many points neither). However - you say _all_ my videos ??? Have you watched all 80 of them ? I'd be surprised - afaik 18 videos are concerned (from Feb 2022 to Jan 2023).

[@rancorbob]

Always learn something around here - thank you for sharing your solutions with us. Do you recommend any open source news or aggregator sites? How do you stay current on FOSS - you sure seem to have a tool I've never heard of every time. 😯🐥

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi Ian, many thanks. I do not have a magic tool or list or the like. Mainly it's feedback I take from discussions with the folks on my discord server. Everyone there has a great tool they use and I do take notes ;-)

[@Kchtulhoo]

802.11r significantly changes the package structure to be compatible with older clients. plus, 802.11r only works (well) with radius server PMK cache generally helps to hack network without a connected client and openwrt network still does not know how to automatically configure itself

[@m7eung]

When I am trying to build my own mesh refresh at home, found your very useful MESH over OpenWRT videos. Funny and comprehensive. In this video, you mentioned version 19 with BATMAN around 18:00. I am wondering if I can build my own MESH using OpenWRT version 18 as I have a AX3000 router uses MediaTek MT7981 that is only able to install with OpenWRT v18. Tried to search for the support Flogic but not able to found a sysimage for it. Seems I can only use v18 for the time being. So I would like to know what was the OpenWRT version you use for these devices?

[@sepult]

Thanks Marc for your explanation and your patience. A lot of work, so Bravo ! 1. Now that you provide us 2 methods, one with Fast Transition (i did it, very easy), second with batman, in your opinion, what is the best solution ? 2. It is not clear for me. when mesh is implemented, do we have to activate only one frequency (2.4Ghz or 5Ghz) or should we differentiate them by ssid ?

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi Vincent, the fast transition can be used either wired (like in the ft video) or with mesh. Fast transition just accelerates hand over from one AP to another. The backbone can be Ethernet or 802.11s mesh - it doesn't matter. You can use a separate band/frequency for 802.11s or you can mix AP and mesh mode in one band.

[@gilcocker]

Any alternative suggestions to Lyra MAP AC-2200? Looking for similar mesh-like devices that can run OpenWRT and be placed around the house. The Lyra MAP AC-2200 look pretty inconspicuous and small. And not too ugly. 😁

[@OneMarcFifty]

Yeah - great devices. I don't know if there is anything similar at the moment (at least in that price range) - obviously there are many small ceiling-mounted devices like the lyra mini (2 radios instead of 3) or the Ubiquity Unify devices (great but expensive)...

[@d00dEEE]

Wow! Great stuff, as always.

[@OneMarcFifty]

Thanks a lot;-)

[@followthetrawler]

Really well explained video Marc, thank you! Quick question - what do you use for creating your animation blueprints?

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi Stuart, many thanks. I use Sparkol Videoscribe

[@richchase3140]

Marc, first off, thank you for adding the luci-proto-batman-adv, and for this great video. I have followed your video step by step (I did a few minor extras that I don't believe are causing my issues, like setting higher MTU sizes, and my vlans are different). No matter what I do, the gateway router does not assign IP addresses via DHCP. I have connectivity between my AP and my router (if I assign static IPs), but wireless clients connecting to the AP will not get IP addresses, DNS settings, etc. My router and AP can ping each other with batctl. What could be going wrong?

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi Rich, difficult to say from a distance. I would suggest that you post your config on the Discord Server so that we can have a look at it.

[@richchase3140]

Marc, thank you. I'm not certain why, but for some reason, the wifi interfaces donn't get added to the bridges that the interfaces use. I was able to work around this by going to the devices tab and explicitly adding the wlan network(s) to the bridge(s). There may be a bug in the luci code, or in the latest kernel drivers (I built from the latest git)? Beyond finding my work around, I haven't spent any time investigating. I'd be happy to join your Discord and we can discuss it further. Thanks again!

[@gamesnovoseantigos8113]

Congratulations on the content. Do you have any video explaining how to create interfaces with each with detailed firewall zone?I couldn't find it.

[@OneMarcFifty]

There’s a video on OpenWrt Firewall on my channel - not sure if that is what you’re after

[@mohamedmostafa-cy4yh]

🤩🤩🤩thanks for your hard work and you make it simple

[@OneMarcFifty]

Thank you Mohamed

[@robertl.9130]

@oneMarcFifty Hi Marc, thank you for another great video! Meanwhile I've also managed to create that mesh with batman-adv from your steps and also from Carlos Gomes' tutorial. I've also the Xiaomi 4A Gigabit which only have 2 LAN ports as you know. I wonder how I could connect a managed Netgear switch on a trunked VLANs port as you already had in the older videos on LAN1? I was not able with bridge-vlan filtering to trunk the 3 bat0.x with br-lan.x VLANs so that on any access point I can connect my 8 port managed switch so that I'm able to connect different devices via LAN? If I put all the ports in the device config like in the OpenWrt documentation (e.g. LAN1, LAN2, bat0.99, bat0.3, bat0.4) and then tick bridge-vlan filtering to create on br-lan the VLANs 3, 4, 99 there are appearing the bat0.3, bat0.4, bat0.99 VLANs and I suppose they would then be tagged additionally like bat0.3.3/bat0.3.4/bat0.99.99 or do I have a wrong thining in my mind or have to put only bat0 to the device to create the bat-VLANs? In short: How do I get all VLANs as a trunk out of one LAN port in any of the access points? Thank you and Grüsse aus der Schweiz

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi Robert - if I remember it well, then I had the same problem at one point. I think it has to do with how MTU is handled on the bridge VLAN as opposed to interface VLAN tagging. I ended up setting up separate bridges for each VLAN, i.e. a bridge called "br-iot" that bridged br-lan.3 and bat0.3 and so on - hope that helps ;-)

[@gwrench200]

Marc, I am a bit confused about this video. Do I need to have the GRE tunnels as the previous tutorial, before using this tutorial? Can I skip GRE and jump to BATMAN after doing the "DIY WI-FI MESH with OpenWrt" tutorial. I was able to complete the ""DIY WI-FI MESH with OpenWrt"" tutorial sucessfully, but have not had success with GRE or BATMAN which I need for VLANs. Thanking you in anticipation.

[@OneMarcFifty]

No - you don't need GRE at all. Just go directly for BATMAN

[@gwrench200]

@@OneMarcFifty Thank you very much for the response and for great vidoes which do not do the ""click here -- click there thing"" XD . The videos are detailed and when it does not work, it is always because I made some mistake and need to watch video again XD. I have since been able to complete both the GRE and BATMAN tutorials and it has been a good learning experience, even though I have a wired backbone. Thanks for the good recommendations which I used to conclude that I dont really need mesh because of wired backbone, but learning mesh has been fun. A salute to you for all the great videos, from India.

[@gil_grissom9669]

I setup a GL-MT6000 as the main router and 3 Zyxel Multy M1 as dumb APs as per your video. On the APs I see that the IOT and GUEST interfaces get their IPs from the main routers' DHCP (the 3rd WIFI "Private" has a static IP). I noticed that all 3 have the same MAC address, the one from the interface "bat0". I assume that is correct? When I try to connect my mobile phone to my Guest-WLAN, it tries to obtain an IP but fails and returns to the last working WLAN on another router. What could be the reason for this?

[@chrisvkr8200]

Marc, is it possible to use this as a better replacement for Fast Transition? I would like to have a seamless transition between my ground floor and my attic that is even better than Fast Transition. So, basically having both APs broadcast the same SSID on the same frequency and the same password. Both APs are wired to the main router. I'm not looking for a solution where each individual device is rebroadcasting to increase the range

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi Chris, fast transition can be used on top of mesh or Ethernet. Mesh is just the "back bone" of it all. If you use Fast Transition (802.11r) I strongly suggest using same SSID and password anyhow.

[@chrisvkr8200]

@@OneMarcFifty my current setup is two APs connected via Ethernet and 802.11r. I've seen it mentioned that it should be possible to have your phone seamlessly transition from one mesh-node to another while the data between the nodes are transferred via an Ethernet backbone. If that is possible this would be a preferable option for me

[@tracnunya7165]

Hi, buried in these comments you stated to one person with a problem.. "The only advice that I can give really is to use the lower channels for the mesh backbone (36, 44, 52...)", i researched the issues and understand the reason, but how do I SELECT to force my extender in openwrt to use these channels only ?

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi, you can select the channel on the properties of the Wi-fi connection in OpenWrt.

[@de-sascha]

Hi Marc cool tutorial thanks about it, love the kind of introduction. Do you have an idea why it can be that GUEST and IOTNET do not get a DHCP address on the dump AP that is connected to the GW by cable. Where would you start the trouble shoot?

[@OneMarcFifty]

I would first try to see if traffic flows over the batman network. batctl can help. Then use static ips and see if you can ping. But my guess would be that the batman nodes can’t route properly. Did you switch off “mesh traffic” on the wifi advanced settings?

[@de-sascha]

@@OneMarcFifty Thank. Seems like I stuck in between. I reseted my 2x RT3200 and configured everything by scratch. I have only 1x br-lan (the default) this have alle interfaces Lan1-4. This br-lan is set in the batwired and also in the batmesh network, on a hybrid device. same settings like in the Video IOT (bat0.30), GUEST (bat0.40), LAN (bat0.10) Networks. Im wonder the bat0 tun-if not showing any RX/TX count. Set the Guest net to static ip, no ping results to the corresponding if on the Guest If from the Main router. Irgendwo ist da ein Denkfehler von mir drin. I know TS with this less information is hard. Would be cool to know what this stumbling block is :D Maybe this ifconfig can help. ibb.co/X4nTgwb Thanks from Heidelberg Sascha

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hallo Sascha, hast Du Discord? Auf meinem Discord server kannst du einen support thread erstellen

[@rosaldanha]

Thank you for the excelent video !

[@OneMarcFifty]

Many thanks Ricardo!

[@protectivedad7416]

I'm not sure where I should ask this. I was wondering on the relationship between the bat device and the bat interface. I was setting up a 2.4 and a 5 meshs I was wondering can I point both to the same batmesh inteface or should I create two batmesh interfaces? I guess if I new more on WHY there is a bat device and then a batmesh or batwire interface I might know the answer. I find the videos great, but sometimes there are small details I am missing.

[@OneMarcFifty]

Yes - that took me a while to figure out as well - the bat0 is basically your layer2 device that you use (like you did use eth or wireless). The batmesh/batwire are used to tunnel the mesh traffic, i.e. which packet needs to go where. There is always a 1:1 between a batmesh/wire to a physical device, but the bat0 may be attached to any or all of them. And the final local usage of your network always goes ober a bat0.x device - think of the batman network as being a managed switch that is tunneled over your network;-)

[@protectivedad7416]

​@@OneMarcFifty Thanks for the reply. I though of the bat0 as a pipe and the batmesh as a funnel. Wasn't sure about the 1:1 relationship between etherent/wifi and bat interface. Makes sense though if it was one to many you wouldn't need a batmesh AND batwire you could get away with only one. That's what made me create two batmesh interfaces. Cheers. Oh, did your Archer C7 work properly. I have one and I had to take it off the mesh (a year ago) because it would keep droping out. Just wondering if the wireless drivers have been fixed.

[@jim7969]

As alway great video with excellent explanation. Just one quest, how would I go about optimization for the MTU? mine is currently 1500 and I have 2 vlans with IOT and LAN.

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi, the first step would be to work your way up from the lowest layer - i.e. find out what max MTU you can have e.g. on the Ethernet. For this you can use ping -M do -s XXXX (where XXX is the MTU you are testing). Start with e.g. 1400 and work your way up. the parameters tell the ping program to not fragment. Once you have that value, you go to the next higher layer (e.g. batman), calculate the overhead you have and do the exercise again. I will need to work out a more elegant way (e.g. write a python script that automates or the like).

[@jim7969]

@@OneMarcFifty Thank so much. And thank you for all the great videos.

[@casquijo]

Hello, Mark! It’s possible to make a Batman mesh with 3 dumb APs connected directly to pfSense router? I like routing just with pfSense if you understand me? Sorry for my ooor English.

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi - no worries - yes - that's possible. However - you can't run Batman on the pfsense Router. You'd need to have one of them at least using Ethernet and bridge the bat0.x interface to eth0.x or the like.

[@pauldavison5382]

Question: if I want to make each of the routers in my mesh dumb access points, do I just follow the steps to set up the access points? Do I still need to set up bridge devices? My routing will be done by OPNSense and I would like to set up VLANs to separate out my IOT devices from the rest. Thanks in advance.

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi Paul, it doesn't matter if your main router is OpenWrt or pfSense. As long as you can wire one of the access points to Ethernet and tap the different SSIDs to Ethernet VLANs which you would then bridge to the bat0.x VLANs on that first devie. Reason for this is that you cant run batman-adv on FreeBSD as it is only available for Linux.

[@StarvingOat]

Hi Mark, thank you for such wonderful videos. I just got my first ever Edgerouter 4. This was coming from ISP routers and Google Wifi etc. I am really pleased with the device and the SQM, specifically FQ CODEL. I was wondering if its worth installing OpenWRT on it? I feel like the GUI is more polished there and I would get access to AD Block and more useful packages. I can even use my VPN services with it easily too. Is it worth going down this route? Thanks so much, stay safe

[@OneMarcFifty]

Tricky question. I mean - if everything is working as it should then there’s probably no reason to change. In any case I‘d double check on the forums to see if others have done it with that device and if you can go back to stock easily

[@Ilshatms]

Great video!) I wonder if it is possible to continue the batman network through the vpn protocol, thus uniting 2 or more private houses? Although this is possibly redundant with ZeroTier.

[@OneMarcFifty]

That’s possible - I am planning a similar project together with everyone who wants on my discord server

[@hbkhum]

Hi marc I have tried to configure it in a hybrid way (wired & wifi), I have connected the main wired router to the node, I created an interface to the main router batwire using the lan1 and the batwanwire node is configured in the wan, however when I connect to the node the packets are lost, I would like to know if you have any example to connect 2 rt3200 via wired with batman.

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi, in such a scenario I think it would make sense to decide which interface (wired or wifi) should carry the bat-traffic and then stick to it. A possible source for lost packets might be loops, MTU.... difficult tosay I am afraid...

[@hbkhum]

@@OneMarcFifty Hi, Mark I saw your message, I can resolved I set a macaddress for each bridge and ethx

[@AVKizub]

Hello! First of all, thanks to your videos! It`s great! I have a question What version of your batctl? In version from official OpenWrt repository doesn`t work commands like batctl tp and some other. Thanks for reply and sorry for my english ;)

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi, I have used batctl-full (there's two versions of the package on opkg)

[@AVKizub]

@@OneMarcFifty thanks a lot!

[@rvanwaay]

Hi Marc, with this video I dare to introduce BATMAN to my network. I also needed this video in 2015 when I was working on Freifunk in Enschede (NL). I'm curious how much speed difference there is between BATMAN and my current one for Roaming_Wifi. If speed is acceptable, I recommend a BATMAN mesh to any tweaker.

[@OneMarcFifty]

Awesome- let me know how it goes!

[@allenperera6158]

Great Video as usual. Need some assistance. I am IT manager for a 200 Room Hotel. I want to mesh all the OpenWrt APs via LAN cables only, not via WI-Fi. No WIFI passwords. The idea is just to have one SSID and seamless roaming for the guests. Can batman do this? Thanks.

[@OneMarcFifty]

Batman won’t help you with the roaming. If everything is wired and if you have an open wifi then you could just configure all OpenWrt devices as dumb access points, connect them to the same LAN, set up the same wifi name on all of them (you may use different channels) and that should be it. You don’t need mesh, 802.11r or the like.

[@allenperera6158]

@@OneMarcFifty alrighty. Thanks 🙏

[@egenethebest9107]

How does roaming work between different vendors? I used to use openWRT because I loved being able to just take any bargain basement consumer router and flash an openWRT image onto it, so that I can have a consistent interface between all ofy APs. My main problem was when I had different vendors on the same site. Clients refuse to roam between APs of different vendors no matter what I tried. They roam between the same vendor just fine, however in order to roam to a different vendor I always had to turn wifi off and on, or totally lose connection to the previous other vendor AP. I noticed you are using dumb APs from multiple different vendors on your network. Are things the same as before and roaming between them still doesn't work or was I simply doing something wrong?

[@OneMarcFifty]

I didn’t have any issues with that

[@Cheney261]

thank you for this wonderful video.

[@OneMarcFifty]

Thank you very much !

[@Cheney261]

​@@OneMarcFifty I am wondering if we can use wired link as the backhauling link

[@OneMarcFifty]

Yes you can. I am showing this in the video

[@raunomakela9226]

Seems that I need mesh at home anyways, great video!

[@OneMarcFifty]

Thank you very much

[@gacosta89]

Hi Marc, awesome video i had a lot of fun when doing the config at home. One little question, after I changed the lan interface in the access point from static to DHCP i was getting IP addresses to my device but I could not access to the luci interface of the access point. I was trying to enter with the assigned ip of the access point. Is this ok? I have version 23.05.0. Thanks!! UPDATE: seems i didn't disabled the firewall, dnsmasq, odhcpd services. Though it seems enabling and disabling services is not saved by the backup config file. A way around this is leaving an admin interface attached to an eth port with dhcp enabled.

[@tracnunya7165]

I have about a hundred hours testing configs on this, all were open, when I encrypted the mesh using SAE my transfer rates between a windows pc connecting to a windows share went up 300%

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi, are you saying the transfer rate is higher encrypted than open?

[@tracnunya7165]

@@OneMarcFifty yes encrypted the speeds are much better, i am guessing there is much more "connection stabilization" that "PRE_EXISTS" in an encrypted connection for the device, At preset I am 3D printing cases for these ex6150 units so I can deploy them around the property, after which I will have more testing info.

[@OneMarcFifty]

That’s great to know- thanks for sharing this!

[@ratazine2027]

Hello Marc and thanks for yet another great tutorial! I tried this set up with Asus Lyras and found out that the second radio2 with channels 100+ does not work when the regulatory domain is set to RO (or anything regulated by ETSI for that matter). It is my understanding that leaving the driver default, falls back to US. I manually set it to US and it works fine. I am posting this here because i originally spent quite some time following a tip from your first video about the ath10k-firmware-qca98898-ct driver but that turned out to be a dead end. The driver that comes with 22.03 is ath10k-firmware-qca98898-ct and works fine as long as the regulatory domain is not ETSI. I am curious if you have seen this issue?

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi Ratazine. I've heard from others from Romania that the DFS settings are not correct (that was mainly w/r to the WRT3200). Generally speaking, I do not like the behavior on the higher channels - especially for mesh (where you do need to be on the same channel) it's a headache really. The only advice that I can give really is to use the lower channels for the mesh backbone (36, 44, 52...)

[@ratazine2027]

Thanks for the reply Marc! It's somehow comforting to know I am not the only one to experience a problem. I went for the channel 100 mesh because that's what you showed in the video. But later on I also concluded that low channels for mesh leaves the wider upper channels bandwidth for full 80mhz channels without overlap. Thanks again for the great videos!

[@DiogoROSilva]

Great work! A question! Can I do the same to the 2.4 GHz? Will the 2.4Ghz also be meshed? Or do I need to make the same process, if possible, to the 2.4? Tks for your work

[@OneMarcFifty]

You can put the mesh backbone on either band (i.e. 2.4 or 5?GHz) and then serve Wi-fi on one or both bands

[@WatsitTooyah]

​​@@OneMarcFiftyis backbone on both bands a bad idea?

[@ytcirillu]

Marc I can get everything to work with a wifi mesh however if I try to setup through the lan2 bat interface on two xiaomi 4a gigabit devices I see the kernel module crash in system log, nothing works after that. I would really appreciate if you could share the configuration files of your setup.

[@OneMarcFifty]

Ouch - that's bad. Which OpenWrt version is that ?

[@ytcirillu]

@@OneMarcFifty Marc I reloaded all devices with OpenWrt 22.03.0-rc4, It is working now. I am however interested in BMX7 routing daemon supporting securely-entrusted IPv6 and how it is used for mesh networks

[@AkosLukacs42]

Awesome content! One quick question: if I'm building network for a single house, and can wire all access points with Ethernet, would batman help? Or just fast roaming should be enough?

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi, many thanks for your comment. If you can put hard wire (i.e. Ethernet) everywhere and if you can do VLANs over Ethernet then there is presumably no point in using batman.

[@AkosLukacs42]

@@OneMarcFifty thank you!

[@JesseCampbell0]

Heya! Does your git repo's luci-batman build work on 23.05? or is the package now included? thanks!

[@hbkhum]

Hi Marc I have a RT3200 router with openwrt firmware I have configured 2 wifi with the same ssid (2.4gh & 5gh), my cell phone sometimes connects to wifi 6, but usually connects to wifi 2.4, I have a Deco X20 and this connects me Devices that are only 2.4, such as lights and other IoT devices, but phones are always on Wi-Fi 6, is there a way to make it work similarly? that automatically detects if the device detects if it supports wifi 6 and that is how I left it there

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi Humberto - that could be addressed with band steering (802.11v/k) - I need to experiment with this still though.

[@doditv6467]

Hi, tolong jelaskan tentang alfred, saya dengar itu adalah sebuah alat untuk memonitor jaringan mesh yang telah di buat

[@OneMarcFifty]

I came across Alfred when I did my research, but I haven’t tried it really - sorry

[@firstnamelastname307]

For fast roaming to work do different access points need same SSID for a given network or is having same Mobility Domain sufficient?

[@OneMarcFifty]

In theory it should, but my tests show that using the same SSID gives better results. I believe it depends on the client

[@tracnunya7165]

Is enabling WPA3-SAE a prerequisite for making all of this work ? Cause windows 7 does not support that. Can I run this entire mesh as open or does it require security to function ? I can't type and save the vlans on the router or extender bat0.3 etc they will not save.

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi, you will have to use WPA3 only on the mesh backbone. The Access point portion (i.e. what your stations connect to) can be WPA2 or open - as you like. therefore you do not need any support or it for Windows 7 ( as it will never connect to the 802.11s mesh in STA mode). You can run the mesh open as well. When you type the interface name, make sure you hit ENTER after typing. Just clicking "save" does not do the trick.

[@tracnunya7165]

@@OneMarcFifty lol son of a ???? yep that worked, enter key lol, ty ty ty, now let me keep plugging away at it, i did get the wpa3 on the mesh only and open the rest of the way, ty again :)

[@pascalmartin1891]

Thanks for all these videos. OpenWrt is very flexible, but even LUCI requires a lot of Linux internal knowledge: it's UI matches the Linux design, it does not match the regular user's needs. My only problem with OpenWrt is with upgrades when additional packages have been installed. So far I always had to manually re-install them. Where it goes really bad is when one of these additional packages was needed to make the configuration works. Once I configured a secure (encrypted) access to DNS, and it all fell apart after un upgrade. Is there a correct way to do upgrade when additional packages have been installed? If there is, this might be a good topic.

[@OneMarcFifty]

I do agree w/r to LuCI. It's rather a GUI to the underlying system than a GUI that helps you answer the "how can I " question. W/r to upgrades: Have a look at attended Sysupgrade (asu and auc). There is a video on my channel "How to Upgrade".

[@pascalmartin1891]

@@OneMarcFifty I found it two days ago and installed that package. Thank you for that other excellent video. I could not test it yet: I already run the latest release. A possible issue is how much processing load this causes on the server side.. Is this why this package is not part of the base install?

[@keshavamurthy2585]

Sir I hv a Airtel internet router,i dont want to disturb this... additional I hv 3 more Archer c7. I want to make Archer 7 as wifi mesh router n connect to Airtel router over rj45, remaining 2 Archer 7 as mesh access points, pls suggest how to go about it

[@husniiskandar5985]

Great video…..👍, btw do you have protocol 802.11p in openWRT?

[@OneMarcFifty]

It seems to be more of a hack-ish approach (you would need the right hardware as well) - look here www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/comments/fewo0a/using_openwrt_as_starting_point_for_home_brew_v2x/

[@husniiskandar5985]

@@OneMarcFifty many thanks Marc👍👍

[@husniiskandar5985]

sorry i can’t open the link

[@shaung638]

So could you use a different firewall/router and still make this all work. Say I wanted to use pfsense to connect to the internet and handle router firewall functions. Can I still use openwrt batman for the wifi side of this?

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi Shaun, yes you could. Assuming you have VLANs tagged (i.e. Trunk port) going from one port of the pfSense router to one port on one of the access points with OpenWrt, then you would just have to bridge e.g. eth0.3 on that port with bat0.3. In other words, one of the Wi-fi access points would be the perimeter to the mesh and you would go off-mesh at that point. But yes - just bridge eth.x with bat.x

[@AdrianuX1985]

+1 Maybe some video about VXLAN on OpenWrt?

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi, yes - there are many others as well : openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/tunneling_interface_protocols

[@jefferyholcombe5189]

OneMarcFifty, Where is the 4G LTE video's that you promised us? You are the only one besides a few other's that are worth AF to get information that makes you understand how this stuff work's and explains in depth how all this stuff work's. The OpenWRT aspect on Routerboard is perfect but the only video's that are worth AF are in Russian about the RBM11G from Routerboard. Small problem with mine, I bricked it and can't access the serial port as they have disabled it on the board to get in and load the correct firmware. The bootloader is still working but you can not get to the serial console as they have disabled the serial port on the board to access it over SSH threw putty using an adapter to get a serial connection! Am I screwed on getting access to the serial console threw the serial port on the board?

[@marine1718]

Great video again if the xiaomi ax3600 supported this I will stick to openwrt thanks to your videos. For the time being I will go with mikrotik

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi Rogério, let me know how it goes - at the moment that router seems to be not supported

[@marine1718]

@@OneMarcFifty the basic works. I'm looking at xiaomi ax6s aka ax3200 since as support for openwrt and is wifi 6

[@husniiskandar5985]

Hi Marc , if my device has two cards of WLAN which one is 2.4 GHz and one with 5.8 GHz , can i use both of them in one Network of One Mesh?

[@OneMarcFifty]

You can use both in the same batman mesh but not on the same mesh SSID.

[@husniiskandar5985]

@@OneMarcFifty thanks Marc👍👍

[@francocastilloAR]

I can't get the guest VLAN to be added on the corresponding bridge. This only stops at the AP. The guest VLAN is created on the router itself.

[@OneMarcFifty]

What’s the error message or symptom if any?

[@francocastilloAR]

@@OneMarcFifty It works now. The symptom was that it said "Absent interface" and it was white and not blue as it should.

[@EmranBillah]

Around 11:42, how do get your new IP after after removing dhcp from your lan? I followed your tutorial, but after the aforementioned step, I don't know my newly assigned IP anymore to access Luci web interface, so I have to reset the device again

[@doditv6467]

Hi, sir i am from indonesian My question is, how to monitoring every node in visual / gui ? Can i monitoring with grafana or somthink like that ? I also want to monitoring db signal in every mesh router

[@valentinlechner4079]

Wow keep going👍

[@huanly9234]

I followed up to 17:20 time mark, when i clicked on save and apply, i got disconnected, and after 90 sec, i got error "The device could not be reached within 90 seconds after applying the pending changes, which caused the configuration to be rolled back for safety reasons. If you believe that the configuration changes are correct nonetheless, perform an unchecked configuration apply. Alternatively, you can dismiss this warning and edit changes before attempting to apply again, or revert all pending changes to keep the currently working configuration state."

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi Huan, that is the built-in behavior of LuCI when it loses connection. The changes would be rolled back. You would just need to make sure that you can still reach the Router once you have applied all the changes, i.e. the new config. Is the 802.11s connection working at all, i.e. can you see the mesh points associated on the Wifi tab ?

[@tracnunya7165]

i have two netgear 6150 extenders and one linksys RE6300 extender, can these be used with openwrt and batman to make a mesh

[@OneMarcFifty]

You would just need to check the Table of Hardware (ToH) on the OpenWrt.org site in order to see if they are supported: openwrt.org/toh/start

[@tracnunya7165]

@@OneMarcFifty i just got a netgear ex6150v2 wifi extender and installed Current Stable Release - OpenWrt 22.03.1 on it, confirmed it does not brick, and configured it without batman to confirm it functions. I have 9 more of these on the way. Once they are here, I will attempt to build a 5g batman on an 18 acre farm, a prelude to my robot lawn mower and self steering tractor for which I will use ardupilot. I have no idea what I am doing, but my plan is, 1- get the 5g mesh (instead of 900 mhz radios) 2- build a fixed point rtk gps base to serve a pair of gps that are mobile with one called moving base and the other called rover (they are both mounted on the moving thing, the moving base provides 1 cm gps via the real base that is permanently mounted in a fixed point, that info will flow from fixed base to moving base via the 5g mesh instead of 900 mhz radio, the second of the gps mobile pair, called rover, is to provide accurate heading in place of a compass and those errors.) 3- build the autonomous mower and self steering tractor using ardupilot, with the telemetry and support between those two vehicles and base command flowing also over the 5g mesh, as well as any pov video)

[@tracnunya7165]

batman 5 for mobility, which will be my case

[@zoransljivic6949]

hi marc, cooles video, danke 🥳 frage: wie wäre es mit einem paaasenden script für B.A.T.M.A.N. / batman-adv? 🤓 grüsse aus der schweiz 🙂

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi, Du meinst ein Script das die Schritte automatisiert ? Klingt gut :-) Ich pack das mal bei Gelegenheit in ein Github repo

[@zoransljivic6949]

@@OneMarcFifty ja genau 🙂 so wie für den dumb AP & Mesh, nur eben für B.A.T.M.A.N.. ohne den script von dir (den der schon auf GitHub ist), wäre ich vermutlich gar nie auf die idee gestolpert, mal schnell mit 20 router ein mesh testhalber zu machen, was echt super funktioiert mit den Cudy X6 (mit Cudy 1200 sollte es genausogut funktionieren). und eben, mit denen würde ich gerne auch die B.A.T.M.A.N. variante testen, mag (kann) aber nicht tagelang rumbasteln ;-) cya

[@francocastilloAR]

How and why to have an administration interface?

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi Franco. That’s just a separate VLAN. I do not want my network devices to be visible in the LAN or guest network. But if I set all interfaces to unmanaged then path MTU discovery has issues. Therefore the separate interface which has all daemons such as ssh and uhttpd

[@AaAa-zf2tf]

How can i do that when my main router(dhcp server) is mikrotik?

[@Techsupport243]

I know this is a long shot on a older video. Anyone else having an issue where only one access point can communicate on the mesh at a time. All the other ones get an ip, but are not communicating or don't even get an ip. All the APs can see each other and are connected if I look in the wireless menu. I have the same lyra APs as in the video. Had a similar issue when I tried to get batman working on a few raspberry-pis with external wifi adapters. Never figured out the problem. I think I am cursed when it comes to wireless networking.

[@OneMarcFifty]

Hi - first off, I do not believe in curses ;-) What exactly do you mean by "they can not communicate" ? Maybe you could jump on the discord server and open a support thread there and explain a bit more in depth what you are seeing ?

[@Techsupport243]

@@OneMarcFifty thank you for the response will do. I joined the discord last nigh. All of the APs decided to work momentarily last night. I want to do some more testing today to get more info before I open a ticket. Seems like there are two many in one area, or only the ones with a direct connection to the one with the wired connection to the network can talk.

[@skug978]

I'm not on Twitter, Discord, etc - So sending you a message here instead - I've just bought a new (business grade) Netgear WAC124 router for cheap ~ 46 EUR and it is so easy to get OpenWRT installed on it (just a web-admin firmware update). As it is a better device, I'm replacing my Archer C7 v2 with this. =)))

[@OneMarcFifty]

In fact - that device looks nice. Somewhat similar to the D-Link DIR 2660. 128 MB DDR3 RAM, 128 MB NAND Flash. MT7615 Wifi. Nice ;-)

[@joshepley4423]

my router has not updated for over a year I have mesh w2400 router

[@OneMarcFifty]

Is that running on stock or OpenWrt? A year is quite long…

[@joshepley4423]

@@OneMarcFifty I agree with you

[@TasmotaSonoff]

Hallo Marc, ein wirklich tolles Video! Leider habe ich es trotz mehrfachem Ansehen dieses und der zugehörigen vorherigen Videos nicht hinbekommen. Der primäre Grund ist, dass diese Videos aufgrund der Materie eben nicht 100%ig aufeinander aufbauen und der 99%-Anwendungsfall damit nicht mehr nachvollziehbar bleibt. 99% der User möchten "einfach nur" zwei bestehende WLANs (Haupt- + Gastnetz) wireless mit einem oder mehrerer anderer Geräte erweitern. Ohne LAN-Kabel. Teilweise haben diese Geräte auch keinen RJ45-Anschluss. Wäre es bitte möglich, dass Du - exklusiv für diesen 99%-Anwendungsfall - noch ein zusammenfassendes Step-by-Step Video schneidest (meinetwegen ohne der Installation von wpad-mesh, batman-adv und Deinem luci.ipk, diese Installation wird aus Deinen anderen Videos schon sehr klar)? Die Materie ist es wert - insbesondere, weil 99% der User aufgrund genau diesen einen o.g. Anwendungsfalls gerade von anderen Anbietern Fertiglösungen beziehen (müssen). Momentan es noch nirgends eine zusammenfassende Step-By-Step Anleitung zu finden!