December 6, 2021

With the new, there are always some growing pains. I guess the new network is not an exception. Nothing seems to be working right this morning. Sonos won’t connect to any music; the new Arlo doorbell is offline for some reason; everything is slow; Pi-hole does not seem to be working; I can’t locate my Raspberry Pi Zero on the network.

Well, a reboot of the Archer A7 fixed many of these issues. That’s fine, but I rarely ever had to restart the AirPort, so I hope this is not a regular occurrence. One of the reasons I upgraded to OpenWrt is because it is supposedly so stable. That said, I did tweak the wireless settings a bit, and I have not had a problem since. Hopefully, it was just user error.

My Pi-holes were misconfigured. I’m surprised they were blocking anything. My main one didn’t even have working DNS for some reason. After installing and configuring Unbound, I noticed these issues. After some tweaking, I think I’ve fixed them both, and I even got the Pi Zero back (I was trying to use the 5GHz connection which is unsupported by the Pi Zero).

I ordered a RPi mini computer/router to play with—really to become the backbone of my network. It has to ship from China, so I’ll be lucky to get it before 2022. I plan to give it all the network control and use the Archer A7 as just the wireless access point. It runs OpenWrt, too, and has a RPi mini compute module. It’ll be my first. I’m probably gonna need a bigger switch.