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eventhough its one of the cheapest crap routers out there

Ahem. The WNR3500L they're giving away is a linux-based (openwrt) high-end wireless router. It was $150 when new, now can be had for $80. Its successor the WNDR3700 retails for $185 and it's freaking awesome. A customizable linux-based router is precisely what I'd choose if I wanted to do an experiment like this.

would beg to differ. However, it still isn't a computer. Embedded devices might be functionally capable of doing many of the same things, but what distinguishes a computer is whether it provides the ability to install and run arbitrary software (not just whatever the manufacturer installed) that allows the user to create and store significant amounts of information without hacking the device in any way.

Keep begging, I'm not letting you "differ"; Not with that bogus argument anyhow.

I SSH into my WRT54GL router w/ Tomato Linux firmware. My router runs Linux from the factory and has a "firmware upgrade" option that I used to install the aforementioned Tomato Linux.

I write my own small C programs, cross compile them for the router scp (copy) them into and run them in the router. It is every bit as much a computer as a web server is -- Hint: you use the HTTP web server interface to configure most every router. My "embedded" router IS a computer. It stores data & programs that processes my data, and transmits information.

Hell, my wired "router" that is connected to the actual modem is a Linux box with 5 NICs -- each of my WIFI routers (one for my devices only, the other for friends / relatives) are plugged into one of the NICs on the Linux box. This Y router configuration prevents devices on the "friends" router from being able to ARP poison machines on the other wireless router (my small programs running in the wifi router can detect and report ARP poisoning and other funny business, disable the WIFI and alert me).

Anyone who gains access to my "friends" WIFI router can ARP poison anyone connected to that router, MiTM attack & DoS attack them as well -- This judge is misinformed. Hacking into the "friends" router can actually allow someone to "steal" my own copyrighted software that it STORES and RUNS.

Anyone who gains access to my wired "firewall" router can subvert the whole system, and screw with my public GIT repositories (thankfully PGP signing exists).

Something you can do on a computer is play a Tetris clone against multiple live opponents and add to or view the stored high score tables. Well, I created a terminal application that uses Ncurses to do just this -- I run it inside the "embedded" WIFI router (4 players at once actually doesn't kill the router performance too much). Hell, search Ncurses games to find games you can run in your Linux based router and play via SSH. Also checkout OpenWRT, you may prefer it to Tomato Linux.

Rule of thumb: If you can play & create games on it and it can keep a persistent high score table its a damn computer.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect that a large part of the IPv4 space is used by smartphones, ebook readers, home and small office equipment.
Either all that stuff needs be upgraded to IPv6 or operators will need to deploy IPv6-to-IPv4 gateways.
If you're lucky you can mod your routers with OpenWRT or its derivatives.

Oh just FYI I went to the OpenWRT and guess what I found? Take a look at this partial list of unsupported routers. that's a LOT of routers that will end up eWaste, ain't it? Oh and to actually even find out IF you are supported, you have to know EXACTLY which chip your router runs? I'm sorry dude but WTF? Hell I'm a fricking geeks and I have NO clue on which cheap ass chip this model of Trendnet runs, and guess what? It don't say diddly squat on the website of the manufacturer either.

So please explain to me how the average Joe is gonna have a snowball's chance in hell of not having to shitcan their IPv4 router, when a fricking geek that builds his own boxes and plays with OSes for fun can't even find out if he is supported or not. Whoever designs these FOSS websites seriously suck, as you need a fricking degree is CS just to find the info! These things make Man pages look like Reader's Digest!

The ASUS RT-N16, Linksys WRT610N, and Netgear WNR3500L look promising. They're all supported by dd-wrt and in theory could work with openwrt. The Asus is some nice hardware for $90.

Openwrt is the router part of dd-wrt. Here's an explanation of dd-wrt's architecture on the wrt54g router that I wrote up for the dd-wrt wiki.

Seconded. I have one of those and it runs a svn-OpenWRT very nicely. HOWEVER, if you live in Europe or other places where radar avoidance is mandated, you can't yet use the 5GHz Band (at least not legally), because Ath9k doesn't do DFS. But it's supposed to be high on the maintainers TODO-list

WNDR3700 is a beast. 680Mhz cpu, dual band wifi, 64MB RAM, USB...it lacks somewhat in flash space (8MB) but still better than current WRT generation (mostly 4MB). There are a few alternatives based on the same Atheros platform: Buffalo WZR-HP-300NH (2,4 N wifi only, but has 32MB flash), Tp-link devices (very cheap). See here: https://dev.openwrt.org/wiki/ar71xx. Plus they have opensource wifi drivers which is always a problem with broadcom devices.

DDWRT Supported Devices [dd-wrt.com]

That's what I thought too. Until I bought an Asus RT-N10 and till today, no wireless. It's basically a cheapskate home router, with the words "Open Source" on the packaging.

The Asus RT-N10 is listed in 3 different places as dd-wrt compatible.

• Wikipedia
• dd-wrt Wiki
• dd-wrt Router Database

Ergo, this router is fully compatible, until you buy one. Then you find out:

• Not listed in the OpenWRT list.
• Forum Discussion on getting wireless to work. Till today, it couldn't.

Therefore, do not just rely on the dd-wrt list. Cross-check with the OpenWRT list too.

I don't have a specific model to recommend, but pretty much all the most powerful routers today are on the Atheros ar71xx platform. Atheros is much better than Broadcom at supporting open drivers.

https://dev.openwrt.org/wiki/ar71xx

The ASUS RT-N16, Linksys WRT610N, and Netgear WNR3500L look promising. They're all supported by dd-wrt and in theory could work with openwrt. The Asus is some nice hardware for $90.

Not quite. DDWRT's also got some proprietary issues. I think you meant OpenWRT, from the same people who brought you Debian.

I think some geeks still use parallel ports nowadays - to access their home routers via the JTAG interface.

I bow down in respect of these knowledgeable geeks.

Yes, but you need to first install linux on the router, there are many flavors such as Tomato, OpenWrt, x-wrt, and freewrt, but I think DD-WRT is probably the best place to start. Then you need to split the network as mentioned below.

So AirControl "doesn't play well with other network monitoring software" (which one, and why?), and MikroTik "isn't built for what [you] need" (what's that?) - other than that, you don't give us any idea what you really expect. What are your requirements? Suggestions out of the blue: OpenWRT with quagga/zebra, hostapd, radius, olsrd, b.a.t.m.a.n. etc. etc, or you might want to have a look at Vyatta (no affiliation).

I used ChilliSpot on the OpenWRT distro running on a LinkSys WRT54g , but I wrote my own CGI and web page for it, so it basically always authenticated if you hit "ok". Here is a decent howto although it is outdated, The downloads were moved to here

Or you could get a router which supports IPv6 *today* and use 6to4 to use a single public v4 address to address multiple IPv6 hosts on your network, and to talk to other IPv6 capable hosts. If you want a router that's ready out of the box, my understanding is that Apple's Airport routers support IPv6. If you don't mind a little bit of tinkering, you can get a router which is compatible with a third-party firmware replacement (such as OpenWRT, load OpenWRT on it, and use IPv6 (I just got a Linksys WRT54GL for $70 at Microcenter - it's a bit more expensive than some of the other 802.11g routers, but still not too bad - and I'm going to flash it sometime in the next week or two, as I get time).

This is bad advice. The WRT54GL is *not* capable of routing at much faster than 30Mbps, because the LAN and WAN ports are on the same switch, connected to one physical Ethernet interface.

You at least need a device with 2 physical Ethernet interfaces, like the ar71xx platform.

http://oldwiki.openwrt.org/TableOfHardware.html

That list has over 100 routers in it!

Unless the driver situation has changed, the USB port on the 520GU is only good for USB1.1 speeds and is really made for printer connectivity. USB2 and HDs will cause problems. http://wiki.openwrt.org/oldwiki/openwrtdocs/hardware/asus/wl520gu

indeed, it appears that even with openwrt you are stuck with kernel 2.4: https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=22016

The thing I understand for many of the targets that are Broadcom is that their drivers are impossible to get. You only get the binaries for the driver and they only work in 2.4.

So, if they did not release the source for the Broadcom drivers, you can't easily port it, unless you use b43 which is the reverse-engineered drivers.

and even then the product is somewhat lacking:
from http://www.myopenrouter.com/download/13853/OpenWRT-Firmware-for-NETGEAR-WNR3500L-BETA-09-18-09/

* WPA and WPA2 are not working.
* SAMBA support is not present.
* NAS can be accessed only through command line using utilities such as ftp
* and No GUI support to access NAS is available till now.
The patches and the script in this release are based on

I mean, no WPA? stuck with WEP so basically a totally unsecured network. in 2009.

Provides remote access to your device even if IP and firewall configuration settings are defunct http://nuwiki.openwrt.org/inbox/ead

If IPv6 is here and working today, I should be able to use it. How do I do that?

1) Install linux on router (openwrt will do fine)
2) Install radvd on router (opkg install radvd)
3) Read instructions to set it up (radvd doesn't have a sugar-coated web CGI like most of owrt's packages)
4) Poke the initscript or reboot it
5) There is no step 5.

If you're lazy Apple's Airport routers supposedly do step 1-4 already.

It's one of the reasons I don't use DD-WRT. For an Internet-facing security device, the author seems to have little regard for security.

Also, the firmware isn't really open source and the author is a humongous hypocrite.

Use Tomato or OpenWRT.

I bought a Planex (PCI) MZK-W04NU based on your comments here - then I find that openwrt is definitely a work in progress on this router and it is not considered stable at all. Did I miss something?

Here is the forum thread on this router:
http://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=83190

there is some sort of disconnect here.

I'd say it's because DD-WRT has a nice GUI and is easy to configure... OpenWRT, not so much.

I use a wireless router as a repeater, and upon searching for which firmware version I would like to use, I found that:

DD-WRT you click repeater, set the SSID of the source network, the SSID of the new repeater network, and assign it a WPA password. Done. Happy point and click. (source: I did it.)

OpenWRT I found that you have to edit the /etc/config/network and /etc/config/wireless, adding about 20 lines to each file. (source: http://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=53924 )

The OpenWRT was doable, but would certainly take more than the 30 seconds I needed to setup, then forget, the DD-WRT firmware that I went with. I think this story is an advertisement because they are losing a popularity contest with DD-WRT. And yes, you can telnet into the DD-WRT and edit the files manually as well if that's your thing.

Other OpenWRT news. The newest Atheros 9xxx radio chips is available in a number of OpenWRT supported routers now. I have been working to help organize new 802.11n support in OpenWRT. I have compiled a list of consumer routers that work with Linux ath9k driver and ar71xx CPU. In order of current recommendation:

Planex (PCI) MZK-W04NU, 32MB RAM and 8MB flash, USB port, 10/100 Ethernet
Trendnet TEW-652BRP, 32MB RAM and 4MB flash, 10/100 Ethernet
Trendnet TEW-632BRP, 32MB RAM and 4MB flash, 10/100 Ethernet
D-Link DIR-615 revision C1 (ONLY!), 32MB of RAM and 4MB flash, 10/100 Ethernet
TP-Link TL-WR941N WR941ND, 32MB RAM and 4MB flash, 10/100 Ethernet

OpenWRT team is pretty close also on the Netgear WNR2000.

These listed above all come from a common Atheros AP81 reference platform. see http://wiki.openwrt.org/AtherosAR9100

In USA and Japan, the Planex is available on Amazon.com for $59.99 with free shipping... it has more flash and USB port. 3 removable antennas, is a nice hacker system. In the USA, the Trendnet routers have been on sale from Newegg, Fry's, buy.com for only $25 a few times. I will try to post on Reddit / my Slashdot journal when I see them on sale for $25 next time.

The ath9k driver for Linux is not yet mature but is moving along... in 2 to 3 months I expect we have a very nice platform... and the router interface and ease of use of OpenWRT is getting attention with this contest! Now is an exciting time for OpenWRT and Linux routers - finally moving to some new N devices.

If they are judged by the OpenWRT's project efforts with the Linksys WRT-350N, Netgear WNR854T, and D-Link DIR-615 are any indication. Two Marvell associates are providing support in their personal time to develop a fully functional open-source driver for Marvell's gigabit switch chip.

I do that on my home phone line (actually even simpler than that -- "Press 1 to continue in English"), and it works quite well.

Could you please provide a link that could explain how one would go about doing this themselves?

I'm using a Gumstix box running Asterisk with a SPA-3102 for the connectivity to the actual phone line proper, and a compact flash adapter (on the Gumstix) for storing voicemail. It also routes outgoing international calls to my SIP account with the Gizmo Project folks (much cheaper than AT&T, the local landline provider), and feeds incoming SIP calls into the house phone.

This was set up as a hobby project, so I wasn't going for a lowest-cost solution. If I were doing it again, I'd probably see about using my home router in place of the Gumstix box (I'm waiting for stable OpenWRT support for the WRT610N, with its USB host interface and 64MB of RAM -- more than powerful enough to run Asterisk in addition to its normal workload, with the voicemail storage and software that won't fit in 8MB flash kept on an attached external drive), or at least get one of the newer Gumstix motherboards with an FPU onboard to be able to receive and send faxes with iaxmodem (as the SpanDSP library it uses hasn't yet been ported to fixed-point, and so doesn't run acceptably on FPUless embedded hardware).

Once the hardware is set up, the actual Asterisk configuration is embarrassingly trivial, at least until I get around to implementing all the wishlist features I've been putting off. Should you decide to go the same route, drop me an email and I'd be glad to lend some assistance.

Linksys and D-Link apparently have plans, yet nothing in the user documentation.

OpenWRT and DD-WRT are third-party firmware for a rather large variety of consumer-level routers and both of them support IPv6.

On the plus side, a substantial percentage of consumer-level routers support a convenient firmware upgrade. Doesn't change the fact that the stock firmware is junk; but does make it far less relevant.

Check for your hardware on OpenWRT's compatability table. An IPv6 router is a flash away!

bah. i previewed my post and still missed the error. last link should have been http://wiki.openwrt.org/Hardware/Asus

heh. i was talking about http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Hardware/Asus/WL500GPV2, which, at the point when i was planning my purchase, stated that several components are not supported. it has moved forward, but still claims that "There are many opportunities for this to not work. You should be wise in the ways of building and debugging software. You should engineer a console tty connection. You will probably need a lot of patience.".

also, http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Hardware/Asus/WL500GPV2 claims that v1 has a faster cpu.

heh. i was talking about http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Hardware/Asus/WL500GPV2, which, at the point when i was planning my purchase, stated that several components are not supported. it has moved forward, but still claims that "There are many opportunities for this to not work. You should be wise in the ways of building and debugging software. You should engineer a console tty connection. You will probably need a lot of patience.".

also, http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Hardware/Asus/WL500GPV2 claims that v1 has a faster cpu.

Linksys isn't so bad if you replace the firmware. Try dd-wrt if you want quick and easy, or OpenWRT if you want to customize. I guarantee you'll like 'em. (Get a WRT-54GL to try it on; they're cheap nowadays.)

Yeah, dual stack is fine, but I don't think that's what the OP was talking about.

Regarding your WAP - could you run OpenWRT on it, or replace it with a model that would? I picked up a WRT54GL recently, so I could play with stuff like IPv6. Someone even seems to have ported ptrtd and totd to it, so in theory it should be possible to go IPv6-only on the local network :)

I see, you may have been referring to something like this schematic. It is in fact the crude abstraction.

VLANs are specified by port, not by wire. Between the port on the switch and the switching fabric/switch processor, there is no such concept as a VLAN. Once the switch has processed an incoming frame, it determines what VLAN the frame belongs to by which port it came in on. It then broadcasts it out to any other devices on that switch on the same VLAN and, if there are any VLAN trunk interfaces set up, it tags the frame with the VLAN ID and sends it out on the trunk.

That diagram is a rough schematic of data flow, not of the actual electronics behind the device. However it does roughly show the three components of the device--the switch on the bottom, the router on the top left, and the access point on the top right.

Note that there are exactly two interfaces on that device which would have a MAC address--eth0 of the router is one, the AP's wireless interface is the other.

No, the WRT54GL is a terrible deal. Compare its specifications to the similarly-priced Asus WL-500G Premium, for example. The Asus has a faster processor, twice the ROM, twice the RAM, and 2 USB ports.

No, the WRT54GL is a terrible deal. Compare its specifications to the similarly-priced Asus WL-500G Premium, for example. The Asus has a faster processor, twice the ROM, twice the RAM, and 2 USB ports.

There is a reverse-engineered open driver for most of the WRT54G family's broadcom chipsets, yes - called "b43".

It still needs a firmware blob (i.e. the code that runs on the wifi chip is closed, sigh), but that's pretty similar to several other wifi drivers, and is still much less sucky than the binary kernel module (means you're not stuck with linux kernel 2.4, and all the nice features of the "mac80211" linux 2.6.24+ wireless stack can work).

  The soon-to-be-released 8.08 "kamikaze" openwrt includes linux 2.6 and b43 instead of linux 2.4 and the binary kernel module. EXCEPT THERE IS ONE MAJOR CAVEAT- AP (Access Point!) mode doesn't quite work yet (it very nearly works though - expect it in months at most). That means (er) the unit can't actually act as an wifi Access Point if you use the latest kamikaze. But it is the "kamikaze" branch, it's not expected to be perfect...

why a device for just this?

when you buy a wireless router, just make sure its a router that will run a decent linux distribution. the linksys wrt54g started the ball rolling, and there is now a rather impressive list of routers supported by just one embedded linux distro; OpenWRT. dd-wrt has a similarly lengthy list. some allow you to attach hard drives via IDE or USB and do file serving as well. most run around 200mhz, have 4mb flash and 16/32mb ram, although better and worse configurations are available. these also have wireless built in, and usually two separate hardware vlans. you can pick up routers for under $50.

802.11n hardware seems to have very poor linux support, and not many routers have gigabit unfortunately. i havent really followed closely as neither of these features is on my "must have" list. the one i've seen moving recently is the wrt350n, which is making pretty good headway and has both features but its still not ready for primetime and is a pretty old router.

in general, i dont see why you'd get specific hardware for this when you could just have a small 5 watt linux router that handles your wan/lan/wifi/simple daemons.

Here's OpenWrt's table of supported hardware. I like to think of OpenWRT as the Debian of router firmwares: customizable, modular, and free. In this analogy, X-WRT is Ubuntu; they take OpenWRT and add a web interface to make it simpler to use.

~$50 (USD) after rebate at newegg last I checked, though I'd use OpenWRT personally.

Hardware compatability for OpenWRT

http://openwrt.org/ (extend yourself, open, maybe takes longer to set up)

http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv3/index.php (web interface like normal, just tons more options)

both should do the trick and maybe even run on your router

check:
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_Devices

OpenWRT hardware requirements If it's version 4.0 or earlier (or the L model), it has enough RAM and flash (16MB, 4MB respectively) to run OpenWRT, or other wrt54g-friendly distributions. (OpenWRT is pretty cool; it has an olsrd package you can install from the web configurator, and with a little bit of effort you can make an ad-hoc mesh. Not useful for traffic shaping, but interesting nonetheless. I expect there are probably tools available to do traffic shaping with OpenWRT as well, I just never needed to mess with that.)

I'm thinking in terms of the following. Im unsure what exactly the feature set of that Cisco is.

1. SIP gateway
2. Kismet node
3. SSH tunnel/TOR tunnel
4. Linux firewall (i'd rather have freebsd firewall, but oh well)
5. IPv4-IPv6 tunnel

more here. I doubt your cisco has that feature set.

Not mine, but for some peoples routers it's here:
http://openwrt.org/ ;D

You can always try out www.locustworld.com, though I've never used their hardware.

Your best bet may be a Linksys WRT54GL.

If you want to do things the hard way, you could try: OpenWRT. If you prefer the easy way, use a tunnel broker. Then only your machine needs to support IPv6, your router doesn't.

At work, we use IPv6 for our VPN, and IPv4 for Internet access. All the separate LANs are using private IPv4 addressing, using NAT with static IPs on the external interfaces; OpenWRT-based routers (take a $70 ASUS router and re-flash it with Linux); and tinc VPN software to link the routers together with a private (unique local address) IPv6 subnet. Furthermore, I run a SixXS tunnel at our main server farm that lets me provide IPv6 Internet access to all the sites via the VPN: hence I have both public and private IPv6 subnets running concurrently. If you want automatic routing, you can use Quagga to set interface addresses, do route advertising, and use OSPFv3 or RIPng to manage the subnets.

http://www.openwrt.org/
http://www.tinc-vpn.org/examples/ipv6-network
http://www.wolfsheep.com/index.php/Bookmarks/IPv6
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_local_address
http://www.quagga.net/