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Today is a good day. The maybe best, maybe most free, and pretty sure most modular Linux distribution for our favourite routers was just upgraded.
Yesterday at 10pm CET, the OpenWrt guys released their RC4 of the upcoming "White Russian" operating system for the Linksys WRT54G(L|S) and similar Broadcom-based routers.
What's so exciting about that? You can see the changelog at their webpage (http://openwrt.org/), but the real cool thing [TM] about this distribution is that it's modular and small. It doesn't try to be everything for everyone - in fact managing a clean OpenWrt installation requires some deeper knowledge of the packages you want to have and use. So for almost every special purpose there is already a solution or at least a package available, which you can install using an 'ipkg' command - very similar to Debian's 'dpkg'. A clean uninstall like this is possible as well, and that makes it IMHO the operating system of the future - free (GPL), friendly, and flexible.
For the first time, a web-based management of the basic router & access point functionality is built in. It supports WEP2. And with more knowledge or demand, you can add (via the command line) things like SNMP, make it a hotspot with or without Radius authentication, make it part of a WDS (Wireless Distribution System - a kind of "mesh" with several other access points), and so on. The possibilities are only limited by our imagination. And all this runs on hardware below the 100$ (some 70 Euro) border.
Great work, guys. Cannot wait to come home and try it out. Thanks.
I informed my colleague Kai this morning about RC4 while I was still at home.
He was late after that. And when he came in, he had already installed it. After giving him a short HowTo, he now has SNMP running on his Allnet 0277 router - one of those Linksys clones:
What we are planning to do is to replace our old Snapgear Lite+ routers with our more modern ones. My Linksys for instance uses 3 times the clock speed of the Snapgear and runs 5 times faster, according to the BogoMIPS output at startup.
The next thing we'll do with these routers will therefore be to make them IPSec VPN endpoints, so we can have tunnels between our home networks and the companies'. Luckily, there are OpenSwan packages for OpenWrt - the exact same IPSec that our companies' firewall uses.
I could give a short HowTo when we're done...
cheers,
wjl
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He was late after that. And when he came in, he had already installed it. After giving him a short HowTo, he now has SNMP running on his Allnet 0277 router - one of those Linksys clones:
http://wolfgang.lonien.de/images/png/uptime-kai.png
What we are planning to do is to replace our old Snapgear Lite+ routers with our more modern ones. My Linksys for instance uses 3 times the clock speed of the Snapgear and runs 5 times faster, according to the BogoMIPS output at startup.
The next thing we'll do with these routers will therefore be to make them IPSec VPN endpoints, so we can have tunnels between our home networks and the companies'. Luckily, there are OpenSwan packages for OpenWrt - the exact same IPSec that our companies' firewall uses.
I could give a short HowTo when we're done...
cheers, wjl