AREDN Release Notes 3.23.4.0

Summary

There have been over 140 nightly releases of the AREDN codebase since the last production release in December 2022. Here are the highlights:

Major Enhancements

• Support for the ‘AC’ class of radio^[2]
• Improved service validation
• Improved WiFi scanning
• Better error feedback for future upgrades
• Hidden and Exposed node handling^[3]
• Enhance AP and WiFi Client channel selection
• Support for easier “nightly build” testing
• Upgraded to OpenWRT 22.03.3; the latest release of OpenWRT with many security and bug fixes.
• Upgraded to Linux kernel 5.10.161

 
IMPORTANT NOTE!
 
Because of changes in the way OpenWRT names devices, this upgrade is not simple to revert without reinstalling your node as if you just took it out of the box.

New Devices

• Ubiquiti^[1]

  • LiteAP 5 AC
  • LiteBeam AC5 Gen2
  • NanoBeam AC 5 (WA)
  • NanoBeam AC 5 (XC)
  • NanoBeam AC 5 Gen 2 (WA)
  • NanoBeam AC 5 Gen 2 (XC)
  • NanoStation AC 5
  • PowerBeam AC 5 Gen2
  • PowerBeam AC 5 400
  • PowerBeam AC 5 500
  • Rocket 5 AC Lite
• Mikrotik
  • hAP ac²
  • hAP ac³
  • SXTsq 5 ac
  • LHG 5 ac
  • LHG XL 5 ac
  • LDF 5
  • mANTBox 15s
  • mANTBox 19s
• TPLink
  • CPE710 v1.0
• GL.iNet
  • Shadow (128MB NAND)
  • Slate
  • Mudi

 
For a full list of supported products, see the list here.
 
Notes:
 

1. Important - the factory installation instructions for Ubiquiti 802.11ac products are new.  They can be found in the AREDN Online Documentation here.
    
2. The 802.11ac products offer noticeable advantages over the legacy 802.11n devices.  If you’re contemplating a new deployment or just looking for better performance, consider an 802.11ac device.  Here’s a list of recommended devices for migrations.
3. Over and above neighbor status states of pending, active and idle, new states of hidden and exposed have been added. Because the nodes talk amongst themselves, your node knows which of its neighbor nodes are nearby but hidden from it. This can be useful for network management. Exposed nodes are nodes that a node can see, but will block it from transmitting to other neighbors when they are transmitting. It's a bit complex - see the 'exposed node problem' in Wikipedia for more detail. The AREDN team hopes to use these parameters in the future to reduce channel congestion.

Full Change List

• RF performance improvements
  • Now automatically enable RTS (Ready To Send) when hidden nodes detected
  • Fixed IBSS (Independent Basic Service Set) problem on 2.4GHz
  • Enabled negative channels for 2.4 GHz 802.11ac devices
  • Fixed negative channels not beaconing.
  • Fixed power offsets on various devices
  • Fixed fccid beacon
  • Fixed -ac coverage calculation in driver.
  • Resolve unresponsive node problems with Mikrotik AC devices
  • Now ignore non-routable when calculating hidden nodes
• Network performance improvements
  • Added a maximum timeout for service checks
  • Provided a timeout on the iperf3 client
  • iperf3: Improve error reporting when server is busy/disabled
  • Set up to refresh LQM’s hostnames periodically
  • Made the default country HX (HAM)Now handle missing IP address and create more general RF/DTD identification
  • Validate state of services over a period of time before disabling advertisements
  • Force dnsmasq to update itself if no network changes for > 60 secs
  • Fixed idle tunnel quality check
  • Fixed WAN VLAN detection on hAP
  • Fixed the netmask on the br-nomesh device (for when RF mesh is disabled)
  • A node with a single RF link can’t have any exposed nodes - corrected
  • Filtered out non-routable ARP entries which confuse LQM
  • Don't let services use hostnames which are not propagated.
  • Block DHCP server traffic from ever going to the WAN interface
  • Reworked the DTD blocking detection
  • Fix occasional LQM nil error
  • Eliminate false network rejoins using LQM information
  • Force badly associated stations to reassociate.
• Node management improvements
  • Improved the quality of the scan output
  • Improved idle tunnel quality measurement
  • Provided better error feedback when upgrades fail
  • Tagged devices which must be reinstalled. (The NAND layout for a few Mikrotik devices has changed sufficiently that they cannot be easily upgraded and must be reinstalled from scratch.)
  • Now gather statistics about RF links
  • Established a more consistent way to provide interface mac address in overrides
  • Support forced upgrades
  • Move the unconfigured setup earlier
  • Handle system upgrade files of type “nand-sysupgrade”
  • Remove WAN Wifi Client key lower limit
  • Improve AP band selection
  • Add extended channels to LAN AP list
  • Fixed PowerBridge M upgrade
  • Fixed AirRouter port identification
  • Made sure we look for packages with the correct architecture
  • Fixed AR150 port settings
  • Fixed Mikrotik boot loader to avoid boot lockup problem
  • Improved firmware failure error recovery
  • Stop RETURN from refreshing the mesh page
  • Fixed support for Mikrotik LHGG-5acd-xl
  • Fixed upgrade compatibility for nanobeam m5 19
  • Fixed AP mode selection when turning mesh back on.
  • More fixes for AP mode
  • Fixed firewall rule checking for existing drop rules
  • Fixed monitors not detecting non-mesh mode
  • Created new network configuration code

Miscellaneous

Merged OpenWRT release 22.03.3

• Updated firmware selector on web page
• Made sure we never pass ‘nil’ to the json parser
• Fixed xlink firewall rule inserted incorrectly
• Removed a firmware blocker we no longer need
• Added a note about the USB150 & AR150 devices
• Added "hidden" and "exposed" node statuses to help file
• Re-enabled the  kmod-rtc-ds1307 package
• Some initramfs cleanup
• Generalized node-setup variable expansion
• Removed firewall counters except for specific ports
• Now use luci’s urldecode_params to handle query strings
• Added “tiny build” notes
• Set PowerBeam-M2-400 to stable status
• Fixed service alignments on web page
• Add SKUs to Supported Devices doc
• Cleaned up Supported Devices doc
• Split the various Mikrotik radios into their individual variants
• Clarified the Mikrotik LHG 2nd firmware versions
• Validate Bullet M5 build
• More upgrade compatibility
• Ath9k driver - no error accounting - added
• Fixed the bandwidth reporting for ath10k devices