openwrt and x-wrt

One of the cool things I got to do this weekend was put OpenWRT on my router, a Linksys WRTSL54GS. This router is actually designed by Linksys to be easily hackable, and run Linux on there. I tried this before last year, and things didn’t go too well then (part one, two, three). I decided to give it another try though, since I originally wanted to use two routers, one as a wireless bridge, to connect a mythtv frontend in my bedroom. I haven’t gotten the bridge thing to work, mainly because the new router I tried turned out to have issues in general, but having OpenWRT on my original one has been really nice. This time, I’m glad to say that the new firmware installed without a hitch, and the first try, too. I haven’t had anything even close to a hiccup yet. It probably helps that I’ve restrained myself from making any unnecessary changes.

On top of that, I installed X-WRT, which is a very nice web interface to control the router. When I first found out about this, that made me want to try again. I have managed to successfully install OpenWRT on another Linksys router back in the day, and it worked great, but I had a lot of trouble getting the firewall to work properly (networking is really not my thing). In fact, I remember locking myself out of it a few times trying to test things. So having a nice simple GUI to do things for me really saves me. This thing is jam packed with features, too. Originally I was expecting something similar to just the original Linksys interface (like DD-WRT, which is also very nice), but this is completely different. It’s pretty advanced, I’d say, and let’s you access everything you’d need to get to to properly setup your network however you like. I had everything setup just the way I liked it in a few minutes.

There are tons of packages in the OpenWRT repositories, too. My little router has 16 megs of memory on it that I can install stuff to, and I’m only using about 40% of that right now. I don’t expect to really put much of anything on here, since I’m happy to have a nice, snappy router all by itself, but there’s a lot of options, from asterisk to lighttpd with php. I suppose this thing would really be a nice setup for someone who was a network hacker, since there’s a lot of fun stuff you could do with all the ports and wireless setup and tools.

My router also has a USB port on there, so if I wanted more space I could just format a small stick and throw it in there. I’ve toyed with the idea of putting some music on there and setting up NFS, but for now gnump3d works pretty well.

Anyway, lots of cool stuff, and tons of options. It’s cool enough that I’m running a custom Linux firmware on there. It’s really nice being able to SSH into your router and poke around. 🙂