Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Things I Need To Document

SDCard mod to wrt54g - Followed the guide here.
Installation of DD-WRT - Didn't follow the guide, but here one is
Utilising the SDCard as /jffs - Followed the guide here.
Installing OptWare into /jffs - Followed the guide here.
Installing atftpd
Configuring WAN Interface for second IP Address
Setting up SSH Tunnel to home for unrestricted web browsing.
Started out great, Died in the ass!

So I decided it was time to try getting my hands dirty and installing openWRT on my WRT54G. Started out with DD-wrt and ran through the process of a firmware upgrade. All went very well.

Once the router rebooted I enabled uPNP and tried opening uTorrent. That worked a treat, if anything my torrents seems somewhat faster than ever before. Perhaps this was all my head, perhaps not, it was 2am and I didn't quite care at this point. I had better things to do.

The next step in my router config was to have atfpd load on startup and for the WAN interface to have a second ip address so as to allow it to talk locally to a modem I use for testing.

With DD-WRT i had to worry about settings up jffs on my mmc and setting up the OptWare packages etc, with openWRT because of the small default footprint this firmware has I didn't need to do any of this and it was simply a matter of ipkg install atftp, setting a few config options and firewall settings and BOOM.. was off and racing again with my test modem.

So far so good, I've got better speeds, I've got a much easier to install tftp server... seems to be going well.

Next hurdle, setup dropbear (SSH Server) in the router to listen on port 443 as well as 22. So this is where i couldn't work it out. Seems the simplest thing was stuffing me up. I can change the drop bear config and have it listen on 443, but then do I need to open the firewall to allow this connection through??? I'd tried leaving it at the default port 22 and using port forwarding to get it going, alas this would never frikkin work either.

So its 4am.. and I've had a skin full of this crap, dd-wrt although a lil bulkier due to its one size fits all nature, was all warm and fluffy in its configuation.. do it via the web interface and "OCCASIONALY" use the CLI when you really need to get your hands dirty.

So until the simple things become.. well simple in OpenWRT I'll be sticking with DD-WRT. Also.. just in case. I tried to flash FROM OpenWRT to DD-WRT and it wouldn't work with the default packages. I found the simplest way was to:

  1. Download Tomato firmware from www.polarcloud.com (In the form of a .trx and not the standard .bin file).
  2. Flash upgrade to that firmware
  3. Then Flash Upgrade to DD-WRT v23-VPN (As this is the version I use)
The only problem i had with this process was that I couldn't log into dd-wrt with the standard username=root and password=admin
So I did the following

  1. Log into the router via TELNET (This will be on by default in dd-wrt and the root/admin password combination will work here).
  2. When prompted Username: root and Password: admin
  3. This will then drop you to a command prompt. From here enter the following
  4. nvram set http_passwd="" and press ENTER
  5. next type nvram commit and press ENTER
  6. Without rebooting, try and access the routers web interface (http://192.168.1.1). You should find the username to now be root and the password is blank, meaning.. THERE IS NO PASSWORD TO ENTER JUST LEAVE IT BLANK
  7. Now using the Administration --> Factory Defaults select the Yes radion button and then click Save Settings
  8. After a minute or so, you're router will be back to its pristine factory default state. The username will be root and the password admin.
I hope that helps some unlucky soul when having trouble upgrading to DD-WRT from a diff firmware.