WLAN configuration

Gluon allows to configure 2.4GHz and 5GHz radios independently. The configuration may include any or all of the three networks “client” (AP mode), “mesh” (802.11s mode) and “ibss” (adhoc mode), which can be used simultaneously (using “mesh” and “ibss” at same time should be avoided though as weaker hardware usually can’t handle the additional load). See Site configuration for details on the configuration.

Upgrade behaviour

For each of these networks, the site configuration may define a disabled flag (by default, all configured networks are enabled). This flag is merely a default setting, on upgrades the existing setting is always retained (as this setting may have been changed by the user). This means that it is not possible to enable or disable an existing network configurations during upgrades.

For the “mesh” and “ibss” networks, the default setting only has an effect if none of the two has existed before. If a new configuration has been added for “mesh” or “ibss”, while the other of the two has already existed before, the enabled/disabled state of the existing configuration will also be set for the new configuration.

This allows upgrades to change from IBSS to 11s and vice-versa while retaining the “wireless meshing is enabled/disabled” property configured by the user regardless of the used mode.

During upgrades the wifi channel of the 2.4GHz and 5GHz radio will be restored to the channel configured in the site.conf. If you need to preserve a user defined wifi channel during upgrades you can configure this via the uci section gluon-core.wireless:

uci set gluon-core.@wireless[0].preserve_channels='1'

Keep in mind that nodes running wifi interfaces on custom channels can’t mesh with default nodes anymore!