[kwlug-disc] what is the perfect openWRT router?

[unsolicited]

There isn't one.

Technology keeps moving along, and individuals needs differ.

Since you first proposed the idea, SD card slots have become frequent, 
USB all but ubiquitous, and some even have eSata ports. Some aren't even 
routers, and openWRT runs on PCs too. Oh, and 5GHz, and was that USB 3 
or 2.0 with that?

Along the way there was also talk of sourcing our own modular hardware 
pieces, only Canadian supplier - somewhere mid-west. And RaspPI came along.

By the time your current router dies, the new round of hardware upgrades 
have occurred, and, oops, are the new drivers open source (yet?) to be 
able be included with OpenWRT?

At best it would seem hardware snapshots / points in time are all that's 
possible, and the audience for that is within the few month time span of 
that snapshot.

What function does an individual want the beastie to have? Media centre 
using NFS (failed for Richard), vpn endpoint, router bandwidth / network 
health device (one off, while problems are being experienced), or ?

As an embedded linux training device, I'm not so sure. It uses jffs 
and/or squashfs, 'without gui', so one can't exactly transport a linux 
user to it, or vice versa. For what you're talking about there, it would 
be easier to simply use a vm, which may in fact merely be running an 
emulator.

Or, a RaspPI or something, and aren't we more in to kwartzlab (which 
didn't exist at time of your original proposal), than kwlug? Or go at it 
as a firewall pc (names escape me at the moment) where at least the 
variety of hardware in play is less important / critical. (Have a hard 
disk, cpu, couple of network ports, good to go.) Perhaps more usefully - 
go at it as a mobile network health device using Android. Where cheaper 
older hardware versions are probably nearby via kijiji, and one doesn't 
have to worry about bricking their every day cell phone.

The openwrt sites and forums seem to be the pages to go to, and 
sufficient. That the hardware pages are complex merely reflects the 
state of the hardware world that makes choosing the 'one true hardware 
device' so hard for your purpose.

Download a file, upload to router, done. Follow single page (per 
hardware device) how to on site, fini.

It's everything after that where it gets sticky. And depends upon the 
question: Where do you want to go today, what is your particular use case?

The challenge for Khalid (or anyone) is not getting OpenWRT up and 
going, it's, and then what ...

The answer to which is more about teaching and presenting networking and 
the ecosystem within which it sits, than about OpenWRT.

The answers of which can also be done on your local PC or vm, with nary 
a mention of OpenWRT throughout. Perhaps even via RaspPI and vlans, even.


On 14-03-28 05:06 AM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>
> (followup to recent openWRT discussion ...)
>
>    hi, folks, rday here from ottawa. not sure if i ever proposed this
> while back in K-W or after i moved to ottawa, but i was interested in
> trying the following with respect to openWRT.
>
>    rather than simply giving a presentation on openWRT, i wanted (as a
> LUG project) to select a fairly decent, feature-rich and
> openWRT-compatible router, and start to (as a group) document from end
> to end how to build openWRT for that router, how to install it, how to
> configure it and so on.
>
>    the value of something like this would be that, if anyone wanted to
> get started with openWRT, rather than agonizing over what router to
> buy, and having to read the docs by themselves, the group could come
> to a consensus as to what make and model would be a good platform,
> whereupon everyone would be dealing with *exactly* the same issues and
> even beginners could follow along, knowing everyone else would be
> seeing precisely the same things.
>
>    i'm sure there are pages out there somewhere where someone has done
> exactly this -- documented in excruciating detail *every* *single*
> *step* in taking a new router out of the box, and putting openWRT on
> it. personally, i'd be interested in that level of documentation as i
> might be able to use it as the basis for, say, an embedded linux
> course for some of my training clients.
>
>    anyway, as a starting point, i would be interested in opinions on
> what would constitute the "perfect" openWRT router, the word
> "perfect" being, of course, wildly ambiguous. so for purpose of
> discussion, what features should it have? what platform? and so on.
> and if all of this has already been done, it would be good to collect
> links to such pages.
>
>    thoughts?
>
> rday
>
> p.s. brief marketing plug here -- i'm still doing linux training so if
> anyone is looking for technical linux instruction, that's still how i
> make my living. :-) drop me a note offline if you want to chat
> further.
>