I thought I'd add a follow up to my to how I ended up to the whole story. (I'll try not to rant) In short, Raspberry Pi works as a router (hardware-wise is a massive overkill) but not worth setting up as a residential access point, because of the following issues that cropped up: 0 Raspberry Pi Ethernet port is auto-sensing, no need for crossover cables. That bit helped me to retain my sanity. 1. Raspberry Pi doesn't come with built-in wireless card, so there are no wireless drivers shipped with OS image (which is only 76MB in size) -- http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/raspberry_pi . You will have to figure out yourself where to find drivers and then manually resolve dependencies. opkg (OpenWrt package manager) helps, but there's still a lot of work that has to be done manually. 2. Serial port works, in the usual raspberry pi configuration -- http://www.adafruit.com/product/954, however login console is not configured, so all yo can see there are the boot messages. You can't access the Internet using ethernet as WAN interface and configure everything through serial console. 2. Having only one ethernet port means that you can't connect to the Internet through Raspberry Pi in order to configure wireless; you have to configure wireless before you can use the only ethernet port as a WAN interface. I found this protocol helps having internet connection through host wireless interface and ssh access to a raspberry pi through ethernet: * Connect to wireless * /sbin/route -a | grep default (write down IP address from the second column -- Gateway) * Connect to Raspberry Pi ethernet port * /sbin/route del default gw * /sbin/route add default gw <value from step 2> At this point you should be able to access the Internet and Raspberry Pi at the same time. 4. Once you get wireless working now you can assign WAN to ethernet interface, you have to be careful, if something goes wrong at that stage, there's no undoing it, and you have to start from the beginning. At this point command 'dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=owrt_bak.img bs=1M count=80' becomes really useful. Also if you need to customize your subnet address do it before configuring wireless. 5. There's no assignment of network devices for wireless cards in Barrier Breaker, so most of the knowledge you have from configuring low-level wireless on Linux is no longer applicable to OpenWRT, however dmesg and iw are still around. OpenWrt uses radio0...radionN wlan.config settings, that could later be assigned a particular interface if needed; however the card I was using(tl-wn722n) had 3 radioN interfaces, of which only one (radio2) was actual hardware that was doing something, which could be very confusing. 6. Host AP/Encryption packaging has become a mess, there are three alternative systems (hostapd, wpa_supplicant and wpad). I ended up using wpad, however package hostapd-common was still required. As I mentioned I used TL-WN722N(ath9k_htc), usb dongle. It's not fast or compact, but is very linux-friendly. Works flawlessly in AP mode. Here are the packages required to get the wireless and this card going. hostapd-common iw kmod-ath kmod-ath9k-common kmod-ath9k-htc kmod-cfg80211 kmod-crypto-aes kmod-crypto-arc4 kmod-crypto-core kmod-mac80211 kmod-mac80211-hwsim wpad This is the package directory for Barrier Breaker / BRCM 2708 -- http://downloads.openwrt.org/barrier_breaker/14.07/brcm2708/generic/packages... 7. You end up with a rat nest of wires: 2x Power(rpi & dsl modem), 1x Network (dsl modem to rpi), 1x Wireless extension cable(optional), and no straightforward way of diagnosing/rebooting the system for non-technical people. All in all, it wasn't worth it to use Raspberry Pi for this project, I should have gotten TD-W8961ND and saved myself a whole lot of time, however the combination of Raspberry PI + OpenWRT offers a lot of potential: * Once everything was running further setup was a breeze, the same hardware can be used for NAS, although SAMBA and NTFS have severe limitation on Raspberry PI * For VPN, SSH, CUPS and other tasks that require more CPU/Memory/Storage than consumer router can offer (free memory or cpu never went below 94% as I was testing out the set up), I was using 48MB out of 3.6GB of storage on main partition. (on a $5 SD card) * The combination Network port/USB/WIFI is a relatively inexpensive way to either put hardware that only supported Ethernet on wireless network, or to add network capabilities to older plotters/scanners/printers. So if any of these sounds good, the steps to put a Raspberry Pi-powered OpenWrt are the following: 1. Install SD image on SD Card 2. Connect to ethernet port and set up subnet 3. Configure wireless, while using your laptop's wifi/eth1 connection to get all the drivers/troubleshoot wireless hardware 4. Unplug ethernet and connect to RPI box through wifi, make sure that both web interface and SSH is accessible 5 Backup. 6. Move eth0 interface from Lan to Wan group. 6. Configure Wan Interface 7. (Optional), Unplug Raspberry Pi, resize root partition on SD card from the host machine using (fdisk/resize2fs) or Parted 8. Backup 9. Done Alex. On Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 6:47 AM, Scott Allen <mlxxxp@gmail.com> wrote:
On 4 November 2014 23:15, Alex Volkov <avolkov@gmail.com> wrote:
I just need dig up a ethernet crossover cable, which I prematurely relegated to be a thing of the past.
Are you sure you need a crossover? Almost all ethernet ports are auto-sensing these days. The TD-8616's and the Raspberry Pi's both are.
-- Scott
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