For the past six months, I’ve been following the tutorials from fernvenue’s blog posts, “Trying OpenWrt on the NX30 Pro” and “Configuring Policy-Based Routing on OpenWrt”, to set up a similar configuration at my place. This has made my internet experience smoother and my network traffic management clearer.
However, I once encountered an issue where PBR wouldn’t start after reinstalling OpenWrt. The download and installation of PBR went fine, and it would even start correctly without any profiles enabled. But as soon as I selected a configuration file, PBR would fail to start immediately. The most critical piece of information was this line:
Installing fw4 nft file [✗]
After trying various methods, I eventually solved it, but I forgot how. I seem to recall that a simple reboot did the trick. But recently, while setting up the same configuration for a friend, the problem reappeared. I tried rebooting multiple times and searched for information online, but it seemed no one had encountered the exact same problem.
Since the OpenWrt at my home was working fine with PBR, I decided to compare the two setups side-by-side. I found that besides the firmware version, everything else was identical. This made me suspect that there might be an issue with the new firmware.
If I remember correctly, the firmware version I installed for my friend was:
And the one that was running normally was:
Yes, it was just a small version difference, but after reviewing all the configurations, this was the only variable that was different. So, I decided to reinstall and configure everything from scratch.
As expected, PBR started working correctly.
Currently, I still don’t know what caused this issue, but I suspect it might be a kernel problem. I have already submitted an issue to the official repository.