This past weekend, I went into a frenzy of network upgrades. I upgraded my main router, and I installed a second access point. The new router gave me a few more LAN ports to work with, so I decided to put my guest network on its on cable.
All of this is done on devices runnging OpenWRT.
On the main rounter, I created a guest interface with a static IP address, and I enabled DHCP services. Next, I created a new firewall zone and named it guest_zone, and I pointed it to WAN with accept, accept, reject. The idea here is that I want to get to it from my main network for administration, but I don’t want it to have access to the main nework. One-way only. I modified my LAN zone to add the guest_zone in addition to the default WAN zone.
Next, I set the access point up as a dumb access point. All it does is broadcast a wireless signal and authenticates clients, but otherwise it passes everything up to the main router for DHCP and DNS. I disabled DHCP and the firewall services in the startup section on LUCI. I created an static interface and disabled DHCP on that interface and set the default gateway to the main router.
Other Notes:
When I configured my port forwards on the new router, I accidentally unchecked TCP for HTTP(S), and I didn’t even know I did it. This shut me out of my server and I couldn’t figure out what was going on for a good while. I asked Google’s AI for ideas, and it gave me all these elaborate workarounds, and then something seemed suspcious about all of it, and I realized it had to be something simple that I missed. I reexamined the port forward rules one by one, and I found the culprit. Once I checked TCP it worked as expected.
Another little note:
Just a little thing here, but it is worth mentioning. On this little desktop switch, I plugged it in and it gave me a power-on light, but it otherwise didn’t work, and I thought it was a bad switch. I tried another switch with exactly the same result, which pointed to the cable. Once I switched cables, it just worked. I point it out because the cable powered on the device, so it intitally looked like the device was bad. I’d never seen something power on partially like that before.