Blue Brick Server

Every once in awhile my router’s port forwarding rules would become invalid when my desktop box got a new DHCP lease and its IP address changed. Unless I enabled remote HTTP administration, there was no easy way to update the rules for the new IP address unless I was at home to access the webmin console over the LAN. I wanted to configure my router – a venerable Linksys WRT54G 1.0 – to bind static IPs to MAC addresses so the rules would stay valid day after day.

With the testimonies of several of my local LUG members to spur me into action, yesterday I intalled OpenWrt – a free, Linux 2.4-based firmware for the WRT54G (and many other models as well). The router was previously running Linksys’ latest official firmware, so I couldn’t use the recommended method of transferring over TFTP without jumping through some hoops. Instead, I successfully flashed the router by simply using the webmin console just as I would with an official firmware. Most of the settings were saved into NVRAM and migrated automatically. The only thing left to do was to create some port forwarding rules for iptables (which did not migrate, but were easy to create) and test network access on each computer in the house. Strangely enough, the only computer that complained was a laptop running Windows XP.

See more progress on: install OpenWrt on my Linksys WRT54G