WRTSL54GS Adventures

This journal documents my process of upgrading my aging Asante Router with a new Linksys WRTSL54GS router. I'm planning to run OpenWrt on the new router, which is an embedded Linux system.

It's a bit smaller than I expected, having seem some photos online of folks that have had theirs apart for various upgrades and projects, I had the impression that it would have been slightly larger. Looks like it should mount under my desk without problems.

I'm not planning on using the wireless capabilities at this point, as I have an AirPort base station, but may in the future. If I do that, I'll need to add an external antenna, since being under my desk won't give the thing a whole lot of range. From looking at the disassembly others have done, this will involve desoldering the existing antenna cable, and adding a new cable/connector to the outside of the router. Shouldn't be that hard to do.

This went well, just a matter of uploading the new firmware (OpenWRT version RC5). Only thing I didn't really like was that it forced a 'secure' password, combination of lower/uppercase and numbers. Most of my home stuff had passwords that didn't fit this format, so I had to come up with something new.

Turns out that after setting a secure password, it can then be changed, and the new password checking isn't quite as strict, so I was able to use my existing router password. Nice.

It looks like setting up the firewall rules are going to be the trickiest thing here, using the iptables commands. Since I'm replacing an existing router with several existing rules, and I don't want the web/mail server to be down any longer than I have to, I'm going to take some time and learn this stuff before I try swapping things out.

I've seen a number of sample scripts in the OpenWRT forums, so I don't think this should be too terribly difficult once I get to that point. One thing that I'm noticing a lot of is that the commands get repeated over and over for each port/server being processed. Once I get my rules working, it would seem that setting these up in a loop would end up being a lot cleaner to maintain, just add a new server address and the desired ports, and let the code loop through all the dirty work.