Omadapi v2

Omada on Raspberry Pi

New in Omadapi v2

• Omada 5.15.20.18 (onwards)
• Significant modernizations to Omada mean less workarounds needed in omadapi:
  • JDK 9 workarounds no longer required
  • MongoDB 8.0

Whats this?

A fork of pi-gen to build a custom image for Omada on Raspberry Pi 5

Features:

• MongoDB 8.0 official community version (Raspberry Pi 5 only)
• OpenJDK 17
• jsvc 1.3.4
• Plug and play - just burn the image ssh in on ethernet (look for IP address on router)
• Omada is already installed and set to start automatically
• Access via ssh
• Prometheus Node Exporter

Raspberry Pi notes

• Raspberry Pi 5 required
• 4GB+ edition recommended
• Memory is allocated by percentage so accounts for to account for systems with more RAM. You can adjust -XX:MaxRAMPercentage in /opt/tplink/EAPController/bin/control.sh. Dont forget to leave memory for the system!

After installation

You MUST login to Raspberry Pi via ssh and change the password on all newly flashed SD cards (passwd command):

• Username: omada
• Password: omada
• Hostname omadapi - Your router may register this if you run something good like OpenWrt or opnsense, otherwise check what IP address router allocated.

Omada

When booted, Omada will be available at:

• http: http://omadapi:8088 (redirects to TLS port)
• https: https://omadapi:8043

Where omadapi is the hostname or IP address of the pi. TLS certificate is self-signed so you have to click-through the browser security warning.

You will be prompted to setup a user.

Start/stop Omada

/etc/init.d/tpeap start
/etc/init.d/tpeap stop

Logs?

In /opt/tplink/EAPController/logs/

Start/stop mongodb

Don't - its controlled automatically by Omada

Backup/Restore

All done through the Omada UI, instructions from tp-link. These are for the hardware controller but should still apply to Omada software release since its the same UI.

Upgrades

Option 1 (swap)

Backup settings:

settings -> maintenance -> backup -> click export, a file will be prepared and then it downloads.

1. Export settings from Omada UI
2. Shut down the pi
3. Flash a new image on an additional SD card
4. Boot image
5. ssh in and set password
6. Go to Omada UI and import settings

If there are problems just swap back to the old SD card.

Option 2 (in-place)

This process is riskier since your operating on a running device... if upgrade breaks for some reason now you have degraded network and a broken controller. Make sure you have a backup before starting.

Omadapi is just a regular Linux system so vendor upgrade path should work so follow tp-link instructions to update the Omada debian package.

Testing

What testing have you done?

• Boot to login screen
• Login, add 2 access points
• Perform backup
• Restore backup
• Mesh wifi with 2 access points
• Firmware update access points
• 7+ day uptime

Building the image

To build the image yourself:

1. Read the pi-gen docs to setup your build environment
2. Clone the repo
3. Switch to branch omadapi_v2
4. Setup your sources.list lines in config (eg to point to a nexus). Local caching seems required to avoid timeout
5. Run build-docker.sh
6. Burn the full image that the script generates with Balena Etcher or similar, then put SD card in pi and power on
7. For publising, rename the image file to include the version, eg:omadapi-5.13.22-0.zip

Status

• Larger deployments untested, please report successes/failures
• From tp-link? Please feel free to make some raspbery pi image for the community based on this!
• Interested to help? Please open a ticket...

Acknowledgements

• Lots of good infos on the Omada Raspbery Pi forum thread
• themattman for providing a guide to setting up old versions of MongoDB on Raspberry Pi
• pi-gen - entire build system