I finally bit the bullet and installed OpenWRT on my Linksys WRT1900ACS (v2) router. The main reason was the stupid (and incredibly insecure) guest network implementation that the router came with. Despite supplying a password in the admin interface, the network was run as an open network that anyone could access. The password didn’t seem to be used at all… Not exactly what I had in mind!
Since Ian presented on OpenWRT at WLUG meetings before, I at least had a rough idea on what I could expect in user interface and functionality, which helped a lot. 🙂
In case someone should have the same router, I found the following links very useful:
- general info on the router and links to images
- tutorial for migrating your router to OpenWRT (NB: you need to plug in via ethernet after flashing, since the wlan is not enabled by default)
- getting fibre working here in NZ (VLAN 10)
- setting up a guest wifi network (2 and 5GHz)
- getting DDNS going (NO-IP.com)
After creating the guest network, I had the strange behavior that connecting to the new network made the access point go haywire. Also, I couldn’t always connect to the guest network either (or had no internet). For some reason, the SSIDs for the guest network didn’t get a MAC ID assigned (and maybe used the same one as from the other SSIDs running on the same band??). Once I manually assigned MAC IDs, the problem went (mostly) away. Of course, manually assigning a MAC ID could result in a conflict with the actual hardware using that ID, but it’s only a guest network. 😉
To see whether the guest network is really sorted, I rebooted the router. And… got a strange behavior that the guest network didn’t come back online properly. I had to manually disable and enable it (via the web interface). I figured out how to use the uci command to do that rather than relying on the web interface:
# list wifiuci show wireless# disable guest wifiuci set wireless.wifinet2.disabled=1uci set wireless.wifinet3.disabled=1uci commit wirelesswifi reload# enable guest wifiuci set wireless.wifinet2.disabled=0uci set wireless.wifinet3.disabled=0uci commit wirelesswifi reload
Those commands, I then simply put into an /etc/init.d script (with START=99 and STOP=99) – don’t you love the old systemv init system??
Now, guests should be able to use the internet also after a power outage with me not being on premise, troubleshooting the router. Well, there is hoping… 🙂