I have set up (today) a router on a small-form computer using alpine linux. Attached to this is a pair of wi-fi access points which I have made from Raspberry Pi 4s, serving the Same SSID in different parts of the building.
I’m going to go light on config details at first just to make sure I don’t deluge with useless info.
The Raspberry Pi 4s are also running alpine linux. The wifi is run by:
- hostapd (access point daemon)
- dnsmasq (dhcp server, also handling dns)
- nftables (firewall)
This works fine for my laptop connecting to the wifi, but for some reason the phones in the house get appallingly poor connectivity, often failing to load specific websites.
Initially, I was having similar issues with the laptop but managed to resolve that by altering the MTU option from the dnsmasq DHCP server.
Another weird symptom is that if I run the phone’s connection through a VPN, the connectivity improves.
I was a bit surprised that the MTU option fixed anything to be honest (I thought MTU discovery would have been fast enough). But now I find myself thinking I must have missed something subtle-but-obvious in my setup to cause these symptoms.
