[kwlug-disc] [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: OpenWRT

Wed Aug 13 23:31:02 EDT 2014

Thanks for posting your presentation. This really was perfect timing.
I've been planning a network upgrade at home for over a year now. We
have one laptop connected full time, one smartphone on part-time, and
a tablet and phone connected even less frequently. Our wireless
demands have never been great as we have a wired network throughout
the house. I'm still running WRT45GL and there are no current security
risks that I'm aware of (even heart bleed didn't affect it) but I was
getting ready for an inevitable security breach of this older OpenWRT
version, or a hardware failure. My plan was to hopefully be ready to
pull the trigger on something if needed or ideally have a plan in
place before a horrible breach. A lot of this fancy tracking isn't
possible on the WRT54gl hardware so looking forward to getting into
it.

I was fully prepared to drop coin on the WRT1900AC, but it looks like
that boondongle has concluded and OpenWRT project support will not be
delivered for the device as advertised (in summary, there will be no
open source drivers so builds cannot be merged with trunk therefore no
official OpenWRT support). Investigating 802.11ac routers further, the
variants supporting DD-WRT or Merlin (ASUS) all use binary blobs for
the wireless side which given the security revelations over the last
year is really a non-starter, so I knew I wanted something that would
support OpenWRT, with 802.11ac support on my wish list. What I found
was that OpenWRT and bleeding edge do not mix. Those people working on
OpenWRT tend to focus on stability so the number of 802.11ac devices
with potential support for 802.11ac at this time amount to anything
with the Atheros chipset (also the ar71xx kernel module I believe)
which is just a handful of 802.11ac devices. Can you believe it!?

By all accounts, the TP-Link Archer C7 Version 2 seems to be the
leading favourite at this time for 802.11ac support and the C7 is on
sale for $90 at Canada Computers this week. Alas, no version 2 boxes,
all were version 1.1. The TP Link WDR4300 device Khalid recommended
(well, one of the ones in his table) is also currently on-sale at
Canada computers for $60. It wasn't a very hard decision. For about
the price of sourcing an Archer C7 V2 online I've purchased an 8 port
gigabit switch, a 350VA UPS, and well supported OpenWRT 802.11n router
(switch and UPS onsale at Dell w/ free shipping). Should be a nice
little upgrade for my home network and my network will weather power
outages since it will no longer be tied to my server UPS. So I went
from willing to spend ~$300 for what would have been absolutely
overkill device (WRT1900ac) to spending just over $100 for what's
probably a better overall solution. For the record, Barrier Breaker
RC3 installed no problem on this version 1.7 device. The wiki
indicates that LuCI needs to be installed separately (for BB RC2) but
I have not found that to be the case.

If you really want 802.11ac and really want OpenWRT there's also an
Engenius 'cloud' router, ESR1750 which also reportedly uses an ar71xx
supported chipset and is also currently on sale for $140 at Canada
Computers. I hadn't heard of Engenius before yesterday and I couldn't
find any information regarding the coverage range with the internal
antennas and given that there's a good chance this device will be
placed in my basement, external antennas are a plus if they give me an
edge for range/coverage.
http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/engenius/esr1750
~pAul.

all good things, all in good time...

On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 8:33 AM, CrankyOldBugger
<crankyoldbugger at gmail.com> wrote:
> Great talk, Khalid!  I enjoyed that.  You got me thinking about a few
> changes I could make to my own openWRT router.
>
>
>
> On 12 August 2014 00:31, Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com> wrote:
>>
>> For those who want to review the slides, you can download the PDF of the
>> presentation from here
>>
>>
>> http://baheyeldin.com/technology/linux/presentation-openwrt-kwlug-august-2014.html
>>
>> In that link, you will also find a link to where you can download wrtbwmon
>> (WRT Bandwidth Monitor).
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Aug 9, 2014 at 12:07 AM, Paul Nijjar <paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> It's August, which for many of us means it's time to head off to the
>>> cottage. Maybe back in the 1950s you could go to the cottage without
>>> your wifi, but these days canoeing without your laptop or telling
>>> ghost stories without your email is gauche. But now it is 2007, and
>>> mobile broadband is not ubiquitous yet, so you need a wireless router.
>>> Enter the trusty Linksys WRT54GL...
>>>
>>> Oh wait. It's not 2007. It's 2014, and even though you probably use
>>> your phone to check email[0]  on your phone, you might well have a
>>> broadband connection someplace, and in 2014 the trusty old WRT54GL is
>>> not cutting it. Now the wireless-N standard is ubiquitous[1], and
>>> people have gigabit networks at home. Sure, some people just buy
>>> whatever router is on sale at the local computer store[2], and use the
>>> stock firmware to distribute their network signal. But what fun is
>>> that? You can't run an OpenVPN endpoint or Asterisk server on stock
>>> firmware. If you haven't noticed, though, wireless routers are
>>> confusing! Some routers don't work well with third-party firmware.
>>> Some routers do work well until the manufacturer changes the revision
>>> and switches all the router internals? Where do you turn if you want a
>>> solid, flashable router that supports modern standards?
>>>
>>> You turn to Khalid Baheyeldin, that's who. He went through the odyssey
>>> of finding a router that would work well with the OpenWRT firmware in
>>> 2014. Furthermore, he knows how to use his router to track the things
>>> those of us with bandwidth caps care about: which devices are sucking
>>> up the data? How can you see what processes are active at any given
>>> time? Are there pretty graphs? In this presentation Khalid will tell
>>> us all this and more. This presentation will start at 7pm.
>>>
>>> In other news, Software Freedom Day organizing is coming along.
>>> This event will be held on Sept 20, from 10am-4pm. There will be
>>> workshops on the Scratch programming language, installing security and
>>> privacy tools in the post-Snowden era, and building your own Linux
>>> machine. There are also plenty of presentations lined up, including
>>> sessions on making a living with FLOSS and on the Open Access
>>> publishing movement. You can find out more about the day at
>>> http://kwlug.org/sfd , and you can offer to volunteer by contacting
>>> me off-list. (We especially need volunteers to staff our installfest,
>>> and to help with publicity.)
>>>
>>> And that's it. Now I need a vacation, but there is no rest for the
>>> wicked, so attending a KWLUG meeting makes for a pretty good
>>> substitute. Here is the location info:
>>>
>>> St John's Kitchen
>>> 97 Victoria Street North
>>> (at the corner of Victoria and Weber)
>>> Kitchener
>>>
>>> Park your campers in the Worth A Second Look parking lot. Park your
>>> touring bicycle along the side of the building. Find our
>>> sunny destination at http://kwlug.org/sjk .
>>>
>>> - Paul
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> BONUS: Mean-spirited footnotes, courtesy of my inner critic:
>>>
>>> [0] Email? Who uses email?
>>> [1] Ain't you ever heard of 802.11ac, grandpa?
>>> [2] Local computer store? It's 2014! Bricks and mortar are so 20th
>>> century!
>>>
>>> --
>>> http://pnijjar.freeshell.org
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> kwlug-announce mailing list
>>> kwlug-announce at kwlug.org
>>> http://kwlug.org/mailman/listinfo/kwlug-announce_kwlug.org
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Khalid M. Baheyeldin
>> 2bits.com, Inc.
>> Fast Reliable Drupal
>> Drupal optimization, development, customization and consulting.
>> Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. --  Edsger W.Dijkstra
>> Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. --   Leonardo da Vinci
>> For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and
>> wrong." -- H.L. Mencken
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> kwlug-disc mailing list
>> kwlug-disc at kwlug.org
>> http://kwlug.org/mailman/listinfo/kwlug-disc_kwlug.org
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> kwlug-disc mailing list
> kwlug-disc at kwlug.org
> http://kwlug.org/mailman/listinfo/kwlug-disc_kwlug.org
>