thebottle Blog

I recently bought a WRT54GL to install Asterisk on because I wanted to switch to a VoIP provider. Initially I bought a WRT54GS because it has a faster processor and twice as much flash and system memory, but I didn’t know that after version 3.0 the system specifications changed. Something that I wish I would have discovered before making my purchase. You can see a list of the specifications of all the WRT54G series routers on Wikipedia. As you can see the WRT54GS version 2.1 has the best specifications.

I returned the WRT54GS that I received because it was  extremely limited in system resources (version 7.2), and I replaced it with a WRT54GL. I decided to install X-WRT which is the Russian release of OpenWRT with a web interface. The latest Kamikaze release comes with a web interface as well, but X-WRT held a smaller footprint. After I had it installed and setup the way that I wanted I soon found out that I wasn’t going to have enough room for the features of Asterisk that I wanted to work which was disappointing. Luckily I had an old computer lying around so I decided to use that for my Asterisk server instead.

I am currently using the router to update DynDNS and No-IP.org and using the SSH server to tunnel through my work’s content filter. Before I was running the No-IP.org updater and OpenSSH on my desktop computer, so I was able to kill a few services that were running on my Windows machine. I also setup QOS to set my Asterisk box as a priority over everything else, so that when I am downloading stuff it won’t interfere with the call quality.

There are many other great things you can do with the OpenWRT firmware, like turning it into a wireless repeater or  bridging wireless networks to local ethernet connections. You can sniff and crack wireless connections using tools like kismet, aircrack, and airodump. It is worth taking a look into if it is something that you are interested in doing. If you are going to crack WEP then I suggest that you mount a Windows share to put the dump files on otherwise you will run out of room on the router.

mount -t cifs //192.168.1.187/test /windows -o unc=\\\\192.168.1.1\\test,ip=192.168.1.1,user=user,password=pass,dom=workgroup

192.168.1.187 is the Windows machine, /windows is the directory to mount the files, 192.168.1.1 is the router, user and pass and dom are the Windows credidentials. Make sure that when you start kismet_server that you are in the /windows directory. This will allow you to crack the dump right on your Windows machine.

If you don’t like the looks of X-WRT or the latest Kamikaze release of OpenWRT then I suggest checking out DD-WRT.