gemini://shit.cx/tech/hardware/2022-02-18-revisiting-an-old-friend-wrt54g/

Last week my Apple Time Capsule started making nasty sounds. The fan has been pretty loud lately but this sounded worse; like the HDD was dying. Whatever the reason, I didn't want to be sitting next to that racket so I pulled the plug. It's been ages since Time Machine backups have worked so it's only been used as a wireless access point for my phone when I'm in bed. The normal Wi-Fi doesn't reach the bedroom.

Last year I picked up a few boxes of computer gear that I'd stashed at my Mums house years ago and forgot. Within those boxes were some Linksys WRT routers. I figured even though they only support 802.11g, they might work well enough. The sensible thing to do would have been to spend $50 and introduce a new access point supporting 802.11ac to the network. But no, I went to the shed and dug out those old routers.

Specifically, I grabbed a WRT54G v3.1 and a WRT54GS v1.0. These are the OG routers for hacked open source firmware. If you've never heard of them, you can read their history here¹.

In the early days of owning my first WRT router, I tried a few different firmwares but eventually fell in love and settled on OpenWRT. I can't remember the details, but I remember lot of accusations (or worse) of GPL violations². I remember being bothered by that and I think that also influenced my choices.

OpenWRT was to me what the Raspberry Pi is to many others. An affordable, capable, simple, low power device that opens up so many possibilities. A few years before OpenWRT was a thing, I was using floppy disk based Linux router distros, namely Linux Router Project (LRP)³ then later LEAF⁴. They were great but fiddly. Package management meant dropping tarballs onto your boot floppy. I ran it on old 486 and Pentiums with a few NE2000 or 3C509 NICs and a serial 56k modem. I also hacked it a bit to boot off a HDD instead of a floppy to overcome the storage limitations. It taught me a lot about both Linux and Networking. The distro was so light that I could understand the purpose of every single file. OpenWRT was similar, but better in every way. OpenWRT had a package manager and the WRT had 4MB of storage, WiFi, Fast Ethernet, a built in switch, is tiny and used almost no power. To me, these things were the shit. The reality is that today my Raspberry Pi 3 would be a much more sensible choice but I don't have nostalgia for the Pi.

I stopped my routers in around 2010. Minimalism was big back then, and I was beginning to understand the personal cost of owning and running so much tech. I turned it all off and just used my MacBook Pro instead.

I plugged the WRT54GS in. It booted but I couldn't work out its IP address. I didn't even know which network it was on. I put that aside and tried the WRT54G. I found a Web UI at 192.168.1.2 which said it was running OpenWRT Kamikaze from circa 2008 but I couldn't guess the password.

I tried and tried to reset both routers to factory defaults, but neither of them forgot their settings. Instead, I flashed a newer OpenWRT onto it which reset the settings. The latest OpenWRT supported by the WRT54G is Backfire 10.03.1 from around 2011. It's old but I'm only using it for WiFi; it isn't exposed to the internet. If a neighbour cracks it, well good on them. I'm not to bothered. My internal network is secure enough and I have unlimited 100Mb internet.

I logged in but damn it's slow. But whatever. So long as it can fling my packets around, that doesn't really matter. I set it up as an access point. I also disabled dnsmasq to free up some of the very limited memory and to prevent it from assigning IP addresses. I connected my phone and loaded up a speed test website.

I'm pleased enough with how well it does. It isn't fast. It's only running at around 15Mbps but for what I do on my phone, it's fine. But the sticker on the WRT54GS was screaming "Speed Booster" at me, so I figured I should get that going, too.

To my amazement, that thing can still run the latest OpenWRT. It has been supported for over 15 years. If you're not familiar, the WRT54GS has twice the memory and flash storage of the WRT54G, but my revision WRT54G has a 216MHz CPU which is slightly faster than the 200MHz that my early WRT54GS has. I downloaded the image and flashed it on.

My first impressions weren't good. It is slow. The web interface is all over HTTPS rather than HTTP, which I guess isn't helping things. It has a modern kernel instead of 2.4. There is almost no memory free despite it having 32MB instead of 16MB. I configured the WiFi and tested the speed. It barely made 10Mbps. It was slower to do the only thing I needed from it. But worse, it kept crashing when I ran the speed test. Maybe the hardware has flaked out. Maybe it's something else. I ran out of time and reconnected the WRT54G.

Before I give up on the WRT54GS, I'll downgrade the firmware to 10.03.1 like what's on the WRT54G and I'll see how that performs. If it still crashes I'll open it up and see if there is anything obviously wrong.

It's been a fun trip down memory lane. The OpenWRT is still an awesome project, but I honestly can't imagine using it for much more than a wireless access point, DHCP and DNS. A WireGuard tunnel might be handy, but I think that needs a modern Kernel.

Revisiting an old Friend: WRT54G