I ordered a WRT54GL and I'm planning on it arriving tomorrow, so I wanted to get started with OpenWRT today!  I did my best to research things myself, and tried to look around so I wouldn't sound too newbie-ish, but, I'm just not sure I entirely understand.  Also, several links seem to be broken... "Forum Rules" and "Faq" above give me a 404.

I'm not quite a power user, so I'm not entirely sure what to say, but let me start off with what I want.

*  Torrenting (completely legal!) is important to me.  I was reading that I should set the NAT Table Size to a much higher value (4096 I think it was), however, I haven't seen any mention of that on these forums.

*  I would like a 'decent' web interface for more every-day tasks like adding ports to port forwarding.

*  Dynamic DNS - I use No-IP.

*  I was reading the Wifi Toggle Switch Guide and this looked awesome!  However, the links to the scripts appear to be broken!

*  I need a secure WPA2 Wifi.

*  A QoS that actually works would be nice (my last router's QoS didn't seem to change anything).

My main reason for posting is that I'm worried some of the guides are out of date.  I'm decently computer savvy, but only a novice with linux, so I'll be relying on the guides pretty heavily.  These are the guides that I'll probably use:

OpenWrtDocs/Hardware/Linksys/WRT54GL
OpenWrtDocs/Customizing/Software/WifiToggle
DDNSHowTo

So I guess here are my questions:

1.  Will I be okay following those guides?  Especially the OpenWrtDocs/Hardware/Linksys/WRT54GL one for the initial installation.  I'll probably just use the Linksys Web UI.

2.  What exactly is the difference between 2.4 and 2.6 kernels?  I listed what I want above mainly because I heard some stuff doesn't work on the 2.6 kernel.  Which one should I go with?

3.  Regarding Torrenting, should I change my NAT Table to 4096?  How would I do that?

4.  How good is the OpenWRT web UI?  I've heard I could try X-WRT...  I don't need anything fancy, but I would like an easy way to change stuff on the fly without having to look up some CLI commands.

5.  Is that guide, Wifi Toggle Switch Guide, the best one to follow?  The links to the scripts in the installation step give a 404.

I thought I had more questions when I began this document, but those are all I can remember.  I just want my OpenWRT experience to go smoothly and would prefer not to have my router bricked.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Hi,

I did buy myself a brand new WRT54GL and have now installed OpenWRT. So I might help you out:

- I used OpenWrtDocs/Hardware/Linksys/WRT54GL for the most part. Remember save the webpages before you start, in case something breaks and you are offline for a long time! Also download every file BEFORE you start :-)
- Start with http://downloads.openwrt.org/kamikaze/8 … uashfs.bin and install it using the Linksys webinterface
- Log in via telnet (remember to download putty beforehand)
- Enter the nvram-settings described on the install document above.
- Reboot
- Install http://downloads.openwrt.org/kamikaze/8 … uashfs.trx, but grab a hold of http://downloads.openwrt.org/kamikaze/8 … uashfs.bin also, just in case. NOTE: Filenames are the same for 2.4 and 2.6, so DO NOT MIX THEM UP!

At this point, you have a valid OpenWRT installed on your system. Follow the install-document above for configuration.

So, to some of your question:
- I believe that 2.6 has the same features as 2.4. When I read the docs, it seems like this "2.6 does not support this and that" was old.
- Setting up forwarding for torrents is not problem. Regarding the 4096 setting on the NAT-table, I can't help.
- The web GUI is good enough. Not to fancy, but gets the job done!
- Wifi with WPA2 (PSK) works out of the box. Some docs says you have to install "nas" or "wpa-supplicant". Not so, if you want to use your Linksys as an AP.
- QoS work also, although I have just set my up- and download speeds. I have not done any finetuning, nor do I know how.
- Dynamic DNS works, but I have had some problems with zoneedit.com. However, there is a howto on the wiki.

Good luck!

(Last edited by Sitron_NO on 30 Apr 2009, 10:02)

Actually I think nas is important if you use the proprietary broadcom (2.4) driver. With b43 you will need hostapd. wpasupplicant is only if you want to connect with b43 as a client to a wpa network.

It is just an inquiry on 2.6 kernel usage and Broadcom 43XX chipset to crack WEP and WPA encryption of wifi networks.

You know the aircrack team issued a new version aircrack-ng 1.0 rc3 a few weeks ago. I have an intention to run the aircrack-ng application on my wrt54gl to crack some WEP and WPA encryption based wifi networks. The chipset what the wifi router contains is Broadcom BCM5352EKBP, which is exactly the Broadcom 4318-as 802.11 PHY.

To accomplish packet-injection to the network traffic I have to use additionally the b43 driver. The application needs at least 2.6.26 kernel. The last issued and stable kernel what OpenWrt is suggest is  2.4. What about the Kamikaze series? What would you say if I ask you on the 2.6 kernel based firmware publication? Please suggest me a solution. Every piece of information is well appreciated. Thank you for your effort.

Regarding QoS, it seems default setup can't work with PPP interfaces (PPTP actually). At least when I'm looking at the conntrack list (Status -> Conntrack in the X-Wrt), I don't see any marked connections for the Torrent traffic. I think that's because iptables chains are binded to the eth0 interface, not ppp0, which is my real WAN connection. But after I added a sed command which replaces every occasion of eth0 to ppp0 in the '/usr/lib/qos/generate.sh all' output, I do see marks appeared. I don't know yet how to test QoS performance, but it seems nothing get worse at least.

P.S. I missed some details, I have WRT54GL with OpenWrt 7.09, qos-scripts 1.2.1-1, my ISP interface is eth0.1, which is called 'wan', and real WAN interface ppp0 (default route). I also added some NAT tweaks to have eth0.1 network also accessible.

(Last edited by smokie on 5 May 2009, 23:30)