I’m kind of a geek at heart, so years ago when I found out about OpenWRT, I had to use it somewhere, anywhere. OpenWRT is an open-source third-party operating system built to run on consumer-grade broadband routers like the Linksys WRT54G wireless router. If you’ve got some tech skills, it’s not too difficult to hack the Linksys to boot from tftp, and then provide the OpenWRT image via tftp server. If things work out right, you get a Linksys on the outside, and OpenWRT on the inside.
OpenWRT is Linux-based, so there’s a shell interface and a limited web interface. It’s limited, but that’s to be expected because the hardware itself is limited. You can, however, do some cool stuff that the original vendor didn’t let you do, like assign the individual switch ports to vlans, run different dhcp servers for each vlan, firewall using iptables… You’ve got much more direct control over the wireless functions as well.
I have been running 2 of these on my home network. The first is my main router, and is configured for a few firewall pass-throughs to my internal machines. It’s also set up for wireless.
When I decided to put another computer on the other side of the room, I at first installed a wireless adapter in that computer. But then when I wanted to work on a customer’s computer on that same desk, I had no connectivity unless I installed a wireless adapter in their computer as well. The simpler solution is to be able to hardwire to a network jack, since most computers already have network cards built-in. For the heck of it, I decided to test out the WDS functionality of OpenWRT. WDS is wireless distribution.
Here’s the basic idea. Configure your main WRT54G w/OpenWRT for WDS and give it a WEP key. Set up another WRT54G w/OpenWRT for WDS and give it the same WEP key. The two devices will bridge across the wireless connection and also act as AP’s on each end. Set the SSID’s the same and you’ll move from one to another with a laptop or PDA fairly smoothly. You’ve also got 4 LAN ports on that far-end device that are bridged all the way through the network, so you can plug in any hard-wired device on that far end as well.
Neat, huh? Well… yeah, it IS. The only problem is that I tend to see a lot of packet loss through the wireless when I have it set up this way. I’ve strugggled with corrupted binaries on downloads to computers on the far end of the link. I’ve done my research and haven’t been able to find a solution, but then again, it’s free software on a $50 router – can’t expect it to be iron-clad and gold-plated.
