A few months ago my LinkSys WRT54G was giving me trouble. Somehow it was fighting with the wireless NIC in my OpenBSD firewall where by for periods of just a couple to twenty minutes I would have no wi-fi connectivity at all. Not even from my new laptop direct to the WRT54G, by-passing the firewall, did I have any bandwidth. Usually it did that 2 or 3 times a day, though some times not for a couple days and occasionally 6 or 8 times in an evening. When that wasn't happening, something the router cause the firewall's ARP lookup tables to fill which prevented it from route packets and the computers behind it would lose Internet connectivity. Sometimes I could just reset the NIC, other times I had to reboot the firewall.
Eventually I got so frustrated at the damn thing I took the WRT54G out of the loop and set up the firewall so it's wi-fi NIC woudl act as the base station for my latop and pocketpc, in place of the WRT54G.
Anyways, almost two week sago, out of boredom (and tripping over the cord one too many times, again, I guess), I reconnected the WRT54G just to see what would happen. Lo and behold, I have had no connectivity issues with it at all!
Since the WRT5G is now over a year old I decided to replace it's stock LinkSys firmware with OpenWRT — a Linux distro especially designed for embedded situations like routers. For exmaple, my WRT54G has a mere 16MB of RAM and a paltry 8MB (yes, merely mega bytes, not gigabytes) of flash RAM for “permanent” (surviving reboots) storage.
In spite of the platform limitations, I am quite impressed with OpenWRT in how many features it has. One example, is iptables, a common Linux firewall mechanism which is much more powerful than the simple firewall offered by the stock firmware's web interface. Another is the fact that I was able to add IPv6 networking to the WRT54G and run the IPv6 tunnel client from go6.net.
As cool as it is to have OpenWRT Linux running on my router, though, I can't say that it will ever be able to replace OpenBSD running on a real computer as a firewall. But being able to put IPv6 on a consumer router you can get at Future Shop $100 instead of $800 for a low end Cisco switch? Can't beat that.
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