After a few false starts I
finally got stitch onto davie so I can replace my aging NetBSD box
with the WRT54g I bought ages ago (it’s is still someones backup MX, but a day off won’t kill anyone).
I set aside an hour last night to do it before I went bed. It took about 3 minutes.
the good
- boots in 4 seconds
- is silent ( as in ‘makes no noise at all’, rather than ‘mini-itx silent’ )
- managed feels a lot faster than ad-hoc (even without squid)
- doesn’t insist on being your DHCP server
- MAC address spoofs its WAN port (don’t have to reboot your CM)
- bridges between WLAN and wired clients
- dinky enough to stick on a shelf
- sturdy enough to survive a fall from the shelf
- HTTPS access to the web ui
- lots of wireless options to tweak
- decent wireless security WPA/WPA2 with or without RADIUS auth (need a separate server for RADIUS, though )
- half decent firewall – DMZ, traffic shaping, port forwarding etc (I only need the last one myself)
the bad
- doesn’t do static DHCP entries (just assign a static IP to the box, no biggy)
- getting dyndns working with custom DNS was badly doced in the web ui
- an embedded DNS server would have been nice (you can send one to DHCP clients, though I’d rather take it as an excuse to play with mDNS/zeroconf)
- According to wikipedia , the WRT54G blocks access to the firmware link below1
I resisted custom firmware images – then it stops being something that Just Works and becomes Yet Another Server To Break. Nice to know they’re available, but I’m not touching them unless I have a real need.
Need to choose which of the two epia servers to ebay, and get WPA2 working.
1 turns out that’s a crock.