evilrouters.net

Awhile back, I had heard from an acquaintance about the OpenWRT project. OpenWRT is a build of Linux for the Linksys WRT54GS wireless router. Months ago, I had purchased one of these units, but it was a newer version and OpenWRT didn’t yet support that hardware version. I ended up giving it away since I didn’t have a use for it then (I bought it specifically to put OpenWRT on it).

Last weekend, I was wandering around Office Depot and seen these units. I went ahead and picked a new one up and luckily OpenWRT supports the hardware now. I never even booted the unit up with its stock firmware. It’s pretty easy to get the firmware on this unit (just a quick TFTP put) and get it up and running. It took maybe 20 minutes from the time I cracked open the box until it was running the OpenWRT firmware.

Once up and running, the first thing I did was to set a root password, which enabled the SSH server and disabled telnet (nice move, guys, seriously). From there, you’re at a shell prompt, just like you were logged into a “normal” Linux box. There are a bunch of pre-built packages for just about everything you can imagine — you can run DNS & DHCP servers, web servers, etc. on this thing.

The only thing I’m using it for is a wireless access point so that I can roam around with my laptop (my D-Link DI-514 took a shit on me a while back), but this thing has a lot of potential and I’m sure I’ll be installing some more stuff on it in the future.

By the way, for anybody looking to do this, make sure you pick up the WRT54GS and not the WRT54G. The “S” model has twice as much flash memory, which you’ll appreciate once you start installing a bunch of stuff on it.