OpenWRT Makes a Great Router

2006-01-07 14:42 - Tech

Quite some time ago (somewhere in early '04) I bought a Linksys WRT54G (v2.0 by the way). This was supposed to be an extra cool wifi router because it ran on Linux. Technically, it did. But like any other wifi router, it was just a consumer box with a little web page front end. Eventually custom firmwares came out for it, and each had a few extra features, but it still wasn't what I was originally hoping for: a cheap low power machine, running regular linux, with all the standard broadband router + wifi AP features built in.

Then, just recently, I found OpenWRT. This is exactly what I wanted! It reminds me a lot of the LRP distro I used to run, built to fit on a floppy disk (and run all in RAM), probably because it's similarly diminuitive, and built on BusyBox.

Once I installed OpenWRT on my WRT54G, I got a real linux box, with command line access. It's so powerful it makes me want to drool! Right now, I've been without DSL at home for nearly 3 weeks, and I have one or two more to wait before Verizon will even try to install my new line. I managed to put my WRT with it's beefy antennas into client mode, and find open access points in range of my apartment, and usually "borrow" some 'net that way.

Now that I've got it though, I've got the hankerin' to customize it. It's time to learn how to rebuild OpenWRT from scratch so I can change what I want!

Comments:

And for firewall ...
2006-02-03 16:22 - arantius

I found the Simple Firewall script from the openwrt wiki to be useful.

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