20250418-32ce0382 - hAP ac lite - Lost nodes after Nightly Install

Interesting, I have two hAP lites that are running NB 2025418.  Both are primarily DtD, one has a tunnel, and the other has a 6 foot 2 GHz link.  Both working fine.
 

Hi, James:

I just installed Nightly 20250421-c4037600 on two (2) Mikrotik hAP-ac-lites (mikrotik_routerboard-952ui-5ac2nd) from
Nightly 20250312 and Nightly 20250314 with no problem.

To be sure, I downgraded to 3.24.2.0 on both and upgraded to Nightly 20250421 on both.
No problem.

73, Chuck
 

Here's the deal, - the hAP ac Lite is the oldest, busiest device in the AREDN supported devices arena.  What with the code growing with the addition of Babel, and maybe serving a bunch of tunnels, the ac lite is a bit memory challenged.   And it turns out that the WAP client in the OpenWrt code is a memory hog - kind of the last straw for the ac Lite.  There are some solutions:

- if you don't need either of the radios in the ac Lite, turn 'em off.  That will recover a substantial amount of memory for the ac lite to use.

- if you do absolutely need a Part 15 wireless access point on your home AREDN system, get yourself an old wireless access point (a home router).   Plug it into one of the LAN ports of your ac lite, so it gets an AREDN IP address.  Then turn off the WAPs DHCP server so it passes DHCP requests along to the ac Lite.  (and turn off the lite's internal radios).

- Make eventual plans to replace the ac Lite.  If you know you'll never need the internal radios, or the POE on port 5, you could go with the Mikrotik ac2.  A better choice is the ac3. While it's physically bigger than the lite or the ac2, it's faster and has more RAM than even the ac2, and has external antennas for greatly improved wireless performance.

Hope that helps.

Orv W6BI