Other than the fact that they start out on different VLANs, is there any real difference between the WAN port and ports 1-4?  I guess that's not my real question.

Here's what I'm wondering about:

Skipping the wireless side of things entirely, I've got two phone lines, both with DSL.  The plan was to switch from one to the other but I want to investigate this first.  It's an easy guess that one line has more bandwidth than the other.

Is there a way to hook a WRT54GS to TWO ethernet modems, and balance the incoming/outgoing load between the two of them, so that one host could take advantage of the sum bandwidth of the two lines?

Would there be any restrictions, such as a single TCP/IP connection couldn't take advantage of both lines, but one connection could be routed along line A and another connection could go along line B?

I thought that if WRT54GS ran two instances of dhcpclient, it could get two different IP addresses, two different routes to the Internet, etc, and there'd need to be some kind of intelligent routing going on, because lines A and B could conceivably be assigned addresses within the same network (same ISP) or they could be on  independent networks.

Narrowband, trying to get a little bit wider.

Apart from a few lines in the firewall script to NAT over the wan ports, there's no difference between the LAN and WAN. Infact, you can create a number of vlans using the vlan*port nvram variables to map it to ports on the switch. (see the docs on configuration)

OpenWrt's kernel includes support for multipath routing, you might be able to do what you want just by adding multiple default routes.

Hmmm..  I wonder about sharing bandwidth, and on this one my interest is more academic than practical.

Envision four or five people with connections to the Internet.  Probably DSL but it'd be even more valuable for dialup.

Each of these people tend to use the Internet at different times of the day, but the connections are "always on".

Is it possible to share bandwidth using some OpenWRT devices?  As in:

<internet>--ADSL----WRT54GS  ..    ..    ..  WRT54GS, WRT54GS, etc.
                     | | |
                     LAN users

And use the wireless capability to route traffic to the other networks?  It's an interesting enough problem that I've a hunch there's a whole protocol out there to handle it.  You've got "interactive" activity, and "bulk" activity, and each person's interactive activity should take precedence on the link they're actually paying for.  Maybe.

No real speed disadvantage because you only use the (medium-speed) wireless link to connect to the Internet, improving a (low-speed) DSL link.  You're not trying to bridge the networks between yourselves.  And you could if you want to, anyhow.

But I'm sure that there's enough stuff on multipath routing out there- the only difference is that we use the wireless link for balancing traffic, and we want to firewall so that traffic fromn neighbor nodes goes (only) to the Internet.  And we want some kind of secure control communications and data transfer.

One advantage is that the communications are all WRT to WRT, so you can take advantage of the higher transmit power, etc, etc.  Seems like a perfect thing for a neighborhood project.

Narrowband