Frequently Asked Questions

What hardware is supported?

A table with hardware supported by Gluon can be found on the OpenWrt Wiki. If you want to find out if your device can potentially be supported have a look at Adding hardware support for detailed hardware requirements.

Why does DNS not work on the nodes?

Gluon nodes will ignore the DNS server on the WAN port for everything except the mesh VPN, which can lead to confusion.

All normal services on the nodes exclusively use the DNS server on the mesh interface. This DNS server must be announced in router advertisements (using radvd or a similar software) from one or more central servers in meshes based on batman-adv. If your mesh does not have global IPv6 connectivity, you can setup your radvd not to announce a default route by setting the default lifetime to 0; in this case, the radvd is only used to announce the DNS server.

Which settings are retained or migrated upon an update?

Gluon provides a Config Mode, which allows the configuration via webinterface. Under the hood it uses UCI and sets options according to the users input.

There’s a recurring misconception that all UCI settings are retained and migrated across updates unconditionally. A settings presence does not imply this on its own.

Only if a setting is either configurable via the setupmode, or explicitly referenced in this documentation - the wiki or other inofficial places do not count - it is supposed to survive the update process.

All other options may be overridden, might disappear or lose functionality after a firmware update or already after calling gluon-reconfigure.

How can I retain options upon updates anyway?

For settings in the sections network and system, the option gluon_preserve can be set to true in order to preserve the sections. However, this is still at a high risk and may result in broken setups.

There are two conditions that must hold:

  • The preserved section must not already exist after OpenWrt’s and Gluon’s setup scripts ran. Modifying existing sections is currently unsupported.

  • Preserved sections must be named, so it can be detected whether a section conflicts with a preexisting one.

Furthermore, this merely ensures the existence, not the functionality of a UCI setting after the update.