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Linux Distro For Linksys WRT54G

Posted by timothy on from the why-yes-it-does-run-linux dept.

scubacuda writes "Here is a tiny Linux distro for the Linksys wrt54g (d/l the distro here). In just a few seconds, you can give your access point's ramdisk syslog, telnetd, httpd (with cgi-bin support), vi, snort, mount, insmod, rmmod, top, grep, etc." Interesting -- "The script installs strictly to the ram disk of the box. No permanent changes are made. If you mess something up, power-cycle it."

6 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. does it still function as an AP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    does it still function as an AP properly?

  2. Well this means... by Nik+Picker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    For us that buying a linksys router is even more preferable. For a personal user to any business criteria the advantage over having full source to this hardware is incredible. Certainly its going to ensure that they stay high on our prefered supplier list provising we can access the boxes and code. incidentally we install WiFi in Public spots for the UK which is being kinda slow to take this up.

    --
    And thats why Firecrackers and kittens don't mix.
  3. Re:What is this for? by Wumpus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's quite useful. You can turn it into a VPN server, have it serve DHCP, put your network's access control mechanism on it, and have a one box solution to a whole range of wireless networking problems.

  4. More constrained by memory by GGardner · · Score: 4, Insightful

    125 Mhz MIPS CPU is fast enough to do some interesting things, but the box only has 16 Mb of RAM, and no local disk for paging. That's going to be the limiting factor for most of the fun things you'd like to do with this box.

  5. Re:telnetd? by Dog+and+Pony · · Score: 4, Insightful

    telnet is horribly insecure

    Why yes it is, in the same way as your browser is "horribly insecure" when you login to slashdot.

    It sends the data unencrypted, that is all. Granted, your server is probably more important than your /. account, but that was a really strange way of putting it.

    If you never would use telnet for anything, then you'd never surf without https either. ;-)

  6. TCP over TCP is fine when payloads are unpacked by Effugas · · Score: 5, Insightful

    (Full Disclosure: I designed part of OpenSSH's tunnelling subsystem.)

    TCP over TCP has issues when both stacks attempt to respond to the same error conditions. This happens very commonly with PPP over SSH. However, TCP port forwards in OpenSSH actually terminate at the daemon, which extracts the payloads, repacks them into completely independent streams, and sends them on their way.

    In other words, an error condition on the routerexternal_site link doesn't show up on the clientrouter link.

    OpenSSH tunnels have surprisingly high performance (it certainly beats most proxy implementation hands down). Easy to set up, too: Simply SSH into your host of choice with the -D option(say, ssh -D1080 user@host), set the SOCKS4 proxy in your application to 127.0.0.1:1080, and you're done. It's really quite simple.

    --Dan