I recently bought four Netgear WAC104 devices, and am flashing OpenWRT onto them.
I have struggled a lot to get the firmware on, due to the not great interface they provide.
The issue is, that it prompts you to change the password, but then when you change it on the page you land on, nothing connects anymore and you can't access the router.
The solution is to click "Set Password" in the Administration menu on the left, and set it there.
Even though there is a prompt to set the password on every page, that will change other settings too and break things.
The router isn't great, and the software is awful so thats why I'm installing OpenWRT anyway.
Two down, two more to go!
This week I finally got a machine that is solely to run pfSense.
I didn't want to spend _too_ much money so I bought a $200.00 Qotom Firewall Q330G4.
This was great and easy to set up.
First I bought a Netgear WAC104 and installed OpenWRT on it. Simple enough.
Then I put that into bridge mode, so it's just an Access Point and not a "smart" router too.
Then I put my Linksys EA9300 into bridge mode and behind the pfSense machine (into a switch) and couldn't access any of my server's sites.
After futzing with that for a couple days, I finally figured out the problem.
I thought I was behind a double NAT, but I wasn't. When I moved my EA9300 from my sole WiFi router, to behind the pfSense machine, I neglected to change some settings on my AT&T modem.
You see — dear reader— when I set up this network on my AT&T Modem, I had to enable Passthrough mode.
This, was set to a MAC Address, not an IP Address.
So when I was making sure to keep my IP network on the same 192.168.1.1/24, I thought that was all I needed.
Alas, there's a dropdown to pick the MAC address of the machine that everything passes through.
I can now access my bookmarks, notes, ebooks, and plex server!
Thanks to my friend Daniel (@sanitybit) - who was a great rubber duck and gave me some pointers when I was debugging, and also helped me find the hardware for the pfSense box!