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Creating A Super-Router (For Free)
Aaron writes "Kind of an interesting discussion and story over at Broadband Reports about the flurry of vendors releasing modified Linux based firmware updates for the Linksys WRT54G router. The updates bring a whole new level of functionality Linksys couldn't be bothered to incorporate. Among a long list of free improvements is the incorporation of bandwidth management, allowing users to end the days of choppy VoIP conversations without swapping out hardware."
Here's a detailed guide on how to do just that.
It's wonderful to learn that I could have powered it up before I sold the piece of junk. *sigh* www.ebay.com
For those of you that don't know, and are interested, Wondershaper can be found HERE.
It is AMAZING.
Sample config:
DOWNLINK=6000
UPLINK=200
DEV=eth0
# low priority source ports
NOPRIOPORTSRC="6881 6882 6883 6884 6885 6886 6887 6888 6889 80"
Sets those ports to only use up 200k of my 256k upstream leaving me the rest for SSH etc. I never have any problems w/my remote connection speeds this way. It's fantastic.
I have only had a single problem, recently, with Debian unstable... It removed my libatm for some reason. I reinstalled that and all was well.
Highly recommended for everyone, not just users of this "hackable" router.
Is that free as in beer, free as in software, free as in "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose, Nothing, and that's all that Bobbie left me" or free as in "If you free me from these handcuffs now, I promise not to press charges". I always get them confused.
Linksys is a hardware company. They make money by selling hardware. By opening up the software (and making their hardware "hackable"), they will increase their hardware sales.
My hope is that other hardware companies (you name 'em: ATI, nVidia, Intel, Broadcom, Logitech, etc. etc.) will see this, and make their drivers (and associated software) open-source, thereby making their products "hackable" ==> increased sales.
I hope the "media" will take note of this, and put it out in plain words so that the PHBs who make the decisions will learn the lesson.
I wonder how many of these routers Linksys have sold simply because it runs Linux and is hackable (in the good sense). They were originally very resistant to the idea of letting people do this. Infact it all started because of a bug in there old firmware!
Now, if only Linksys could release proper Linux drivers for there other wireless goods. At the moment they are all useless to Linux users.
Once Comcast lets you in on what your unlimited bandwidth limits really are, you could use this to meter your access to help keep you under the unlimited limit...
Happiness is like peeing yourself. Everybody can see it but only you can feel its warmth.
The updates bring a whole new level of functionality Linksys couldn't be bothered to incorporate.
Thanks for the link to the modifications you couldn't be bothered to make for me, Aaron. I guess I'll have to go buy a Linksys, since you couldn't be bothered with buying one for me.
Nice little anti-corporate jab there. Linksys builds good solid stuff for a reasonable price, and all you can do is complain that it doesn't do everything.
I didn't see one feature mentioned that I'd really, really like to see added to these boxes: an IPv6 6to4 tunnel. This is an ideal way to penetrate a NAT so you can establish direct TCP connections (and speak UDP) to any servers on your LAN from the outside. IPv6 support has been in all of the major operating systems for some time now, including Windows XP, Linux and Mac OS X, and while not every application is IPv6 ready, the important ones (like SSH) already are.
If 6to4 tunneling could be added to these consumer routers alongside IPv4 NAT, IPv6 stands to really take off without any help whatsoever from the ISPs. In fact, I almost prefer that my ISP not implement native IPv6. I like the fact that they now carry my encapsulated IPv6 packets without any ingress filtering, port blocking or other end-to-end-wrecking nonsense, and that they are oblivious to (much less control) the IPv6 address space. If or when the ISPs do implement native IPv6, you can bet that they'll exercise the same degree of arbitrary control that they now do over IPv4.
This will certainly move a lot a hardware for linksys. Look at the Rockbox mods for Archos for another example. Those who think that you can't make money off the GPL are wrong, at least in the case of hardware makers GPL'ing their firmware. (Although they didn't have a choice since they used linux as the firmware.)
Their was a story awhile back here on slashdot that discussed that Intel didn't want to release open source drivers for Centrino. They should. Open source drivers and firmware can be a boon to hardware makers.You have 5 Moderator Points! Use 'em or lose 'em! They will expire before any good stories are posted.
I like my ClarkConnect box better. All it cost me was a pile of old parts that were headed for the dumpster and a ~300 MB download.
lose != loose
There is a LOT of truth to this.
Last month, my company was looking for a replacement for the overly expensive, hard to manage firewall. Our favorite consultants (who seem think we are idiots and yet don't understand the words "packet filtering") tried to sell us on a Cisco firewall device that was something like $2000. I thought this was insane, seeing as all we needed was a nice interface to ipchains (nobody but me knows Linux here, so that wasn't an option). I look at LinkSys, but they didn't have anything which would do anything more advanced than direct NAT. This seemed strange to me, as at home I had a Linksys firewall router that allowed me to do pretty much whatever I liked when it came to mapping ports and setting up load balancing.
Dlink -- who used to be a direct competitor to Linksys in every segment of the market -- had an awesome device which rivalled the features of the Cisco router for only $300. I had a problem with the first one they sent out, got good support and they sent me a replacement. I had that one up and running in an afternoon without a problem (well, with one problem, but that was due to the Cisco cable router, not the Dlink). And we saved so much money, we could afford a nice spam filter and a new development server. And the new device has a nice, fairly unbuggy web interface that is way easier to use than plain ipchains/iptables with MOST of the functionality (it does bomb out after a certain number of NAT mappings, but since this thing is only 300 MHz I suppose that's for the best).
Hey freaks: now you're ju
You can also do a CNAME from your Custom DNS to your DynDNS domain. For example:
:)
www.customdns.com -> thog.dyndns.org
The CNAME will always track your dyndns name that way
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
I wouldn't say he was an advocate. He merely said he understood why wired companies were freaking out.
;)
However, I definately noticed a drop in the sound quality when he switched back to VOIP. I also noticed he hadn't canceled his landline subscription yet.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I use a Netgear DG834G which appears to run linux 2.4.17 on its MIPS malta processor.
You can download a bundle of the packages it uses from netgear but they are not configured so its
hard to patch or hack with it cos you'd have to
redo their work.
This seems at odds with the GPL , on the grounds
that if you use GPL'ed code you must publish not
just the original source but your modifications as well . or am i wrong ?
The firmware upgrade patch is easily dissasembled and i've managed to hack the file system (cramfs) out of the firmware . So there is a possiblilty
that modifying the filesystem might open up safer
modification by making telnet accessable. but i'm
too much of a chicken to try it and i expect the
checksum would fail.
[site]
Please, unless you live waaay out in the sticks.... the 2.4GHz band is getting crowded enough; cranking up your WAP output by 4 times just so you can use a laptop in the basement crapper can be a very un-neighborly thing to do. I'm having a hard time coming up with a channel that isn't being stomped on or stomping on someone else's nearby WLAN.
All kidding aside, here's the business model for 2004:
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
and a lot of the routing logic is hardware based so they are able to scale & perform much better than the latter
That's only true if you're not doing anything but routing. Start adding in any features that are remotely useful, and you've gone from CEF/fast switching to process switching. And that means you take a 5x to 10x performance hit.
You actually have to purchase a *VERY* expensive Cisco to get one that can't be out-performed by even a relatively modest PC.
And even on the high-end, there are PC's that will completely blow away any but the very largest offerings from Cisco.
There are, of course, several real advantages to using a Cisco router instead of a PC. First and foremost, if you have the money for it, you're going to be able to find a network interface for almost any type of network you can imagine. DSL to SONET, the interfaces are there for the buying. I'd *almost* say that they would "just work", but that's not always the case. I just had to upgrade the IOS versio on one of my Ciscos (a *paid* upgrade) to get nothing but support for an additional ethernet WIC.
Another large (perhaps HUGE) advantage is the fact that as long as you want to keep paying the money for it, there will always be someone there to back you up and make sure your problem gets resolved, even if you're not capable of fixing it yourself.
So, I'm not saying that there's no use for Cisco. I'm just saying that absolute performance (and especially price-for-performance) are not real advantages for them.
I don't know why they would want to hold back Linksys development though
You can't? Let's think about it: Do you think they'd rather sell a $200 Linksys router, or a $2,000+ Cisco router?
I know, it sounds cynical. Unfortunately, I've worked in enough corporations to know that is *exactly* how decisions are made on these things.
They'll keep the Linksys line around for the low-end market, the home users that don't demand much. But for anything above that, they're never going to let Linksys compete with their Cisco line. They're not stupid.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I had a rather power hungry PC based wireless/3G/APRS/AX.25 router in my car for a while which I used to serve Internet at conventions and such. I recently replaced it with the WRT54G and the sveasoft firmware, which has several benefits:
:)
:)
- The WRT54G only uses a few watts, whereas the PC based router spiked at 300W during startup and consumed north of 60W at idle and south of 100W during load. I also lost between 10-30% of the power due to conversion losses from the DC-AC-DC conversion through the auto inverter, since I couldn't find a good ATX power supply that ran on DC that I could couple to the car's batteries...
- The WRT54G has dual antenna jacks that I don't need to buy delicate adapters or pigtails for. I couple them directly to the jacks on twin high gain 2.4GHz dipole magmounts on the roof of the car, which gives me way better reception than I was getting from the orinoco, a pigtail, and a single one of the same antennas.
- Speaking of reception, kismet has been ported to the WRT54G! I don't need to screw around with the orinoco patches or hack my prism2 cards to add an antenna jack; it just works. I currently feed wifi data from the WRT54G to another computer which actually merges the GPS data with the wifi data from the WRT54G, because the WRT54G only has 4MB flash and 32K NVRAM for persistent storage, and you have to solder a USB serial chipset to the WRT54G PCB to add a serial port to it (for reading GPS's NMEA output); it doesn't come with one.
- Now that sveasoft added dropbear to their latest firmware, you can ssh into the device and run wakeonlan to power up other devices on your network remotely. This is seriously cool shit; I park my car, it associates with my home AP in client mode and shows up on my home network. I can then ssh into the WRT54G to power up the other computers in the car using wakeonlan to transfer files to them (transfer rate is somewhere around 1 megabyte per second in my environment), start the car, use the TNC in the car's ham radio, etc. I had to turn off the PC based router I was using before because it would drain the deep cycle marine batteries I'm using to power the car computers in an hour or two at load, but now I can leave the WRT54G on for a few days before the batteries even get low.
- If I forget where I parked my car, the antennas I'm using for the WRT54G are +6dBi, so I can pull out something with 802.11{b,g} and warwalk the parking lot looking for a strong signal from the WRT54G
- It's only $80 brand new around here in the bay area, which is damn cheap for a low power 200MHz Linux box with 16MB of memory, FIVE ethernet jacks, your choice of DC or AC power, pretty lights, official vendor provided source code for the firmware, an active community hacking on it, and a 802.11g capable wifi chipset with diversity antennas in form factor half the size of the smallest mini-ITX machine you can possibly get. And they're on the used market for prices approaching numbers that make me want to say it's close to disposable pricing. Heh, disposable routers
-- thalakan
I've got a WRT54G that I tried to install for a client to connect with her corporate PPTP VPN. It didn't work with PPTP VPN - apparently it was dropping GRE packets.
...I then tried various versions of the Linksys firmware to no avail. Eventually I stumbled across http://h.vu.wifi-box.net and found a hacked firmware upgrade that fixed the problem but I have serious reservations about using this for my client!
I have no access to the source code so how do I know whether or not this hacked upgrade monitors outgoing connections and passes interesting bits of information on to the author?
Certainly I could sniff the wire and find out for sure but I don't have time for this!!! There's tremendous potential for a malicious third party to monitor traffic using this. It just makes me leery when there's no source code to preview. Even if there was, I don't have the time to review it!
Any similar thoughts/concerns?
You need people like me so you can point your fucking fingers, and say "that's the bad guy."