From Homebrew Router to OpenWRT
Table of Contents
Wireless Freedom for the 4th of July
I'm switching my Homebrewed Debian Router running nftables to Pi-Hole to OpenWRT.
1. Why?
Because I want something easier to manage. Setting up a raw Linux firewall using just nftables was cool, but feels a bit like this cobbled together mess especially after I added Pi-Hole to the mix, and I just want to try a proper router distro now.
2. OpenWRT
OpenWRT is mainly targeted toward embedded devices like the old router
you might have laying around at home, but it can actually be installed
on regular x8664 PC Hardware too. There's no proper installer though,
you need to download an .img then dd that on to you the hard drive
you want to install OpenWRT on. After that you will need to resize the
root partition to fill the rest of your hard drive.
Check out the official docs here.
2.1. Installation
dd if=openwrt-21.02.0-x86-64-generic-ext4-combined.img bs=1M of=/dev/sdX
and then you're done. That's it. Well almost, you need to expand the
root filesystem. You should also probably install additional firmware.
Thankfully, resizing the root filesystem is super easy:
# Install packages opkg update opkg install parted # Identify disk name and partition number parted -l -s # Expand root partition parted -f -s /dev/sda resizepart 2 100% # Apply changes reboot
To resize the partition, and then:
# Install packages opkg update opkg install losetup resize2fs # Map loop device to root partition losetup /dev/loop0 /dev/sda2 2> /dev/null # Expand root filesystem resize2fs -f /dev/loop0 # Apply changes reboot
To resize the filesystem.
3. Thoughts
It's pretty cool so far. As much as I like being neckbeard commandline warrior having a GUI to easily visually everything and see who's connected to the network and metrics is pretty nice. I also still have the TP Link router also with OpenWRT on it which I will continue to use as a WAP.