TechFindings

My old Linksys WRT54GL has worked fine for long. I want OpenWRT and I want some VPN solution, and the last OpenWRT version that runs properly on WRT54GL is 10.03.1, which is 4 years old by now. That means old versions of all software, and possible security issues.

I gave OpenWRT Barrier Breaker RC1 a chance on my WRT54GL. I even rebuilt OpenWRT from scratch (buildroot and all) to produce a minimal image (no IPv6, among other things). It was well below 3MB big, so I had a whole MB of flash drive available, but the Wireless network just won’t run (for more than a few minutes, then the router almost halts completely). 16Mb of RAM is simply too little.

My thoughts about a new router were ultimately inspired by the announcement of the Linksys WRT1900AC. However, the WRT1900AC was supposed to be FOSS-friendly but now several months later the driver sources required by OpenWRT has still not been released. It seems Belkin has done a really ugly thing. So no thanks Linksys (owned by Belkin).

OpenWRT works on many different routers, but many of them are not very powerful (8Mb flash/32Mb RAM is common). Since I have been struggling with my WRT54GL for years I wanted to get a powerful router this time, that gives me flexibility. As soon as you want something more powerful than 8/32Mb, that is also supported by OpenWRT, you do not have so many choices. And many routers that work are hard to actually buy. To confuse things further, many routers come in different versions with different support, (Netgear WNDR3700 being perhaps the worst example).

TP Link WDR4900
I ended up with a router that is classified as Work in Progress by OpenWRT: the TP-Link WDR4900 (European version 1.3). It has 16Mb of flash and 128Mb or RAM, and a 800MHz PowerPC CPU – who could resist such amazing hardware?

As it was listed as Work in Progress I expected problems, but none so far! I have installed OpenWRT Barrier Breaker RC2 (generic, not the p1020), and I use it as most people would. Both 2.4Ghz and 5GHz WiFi works fine (although, I have read that 40Mhz band does not work, so I have not tried that). The router has 10MB available flash (compared to just 2MB, for a similar 8MB router) and 96Mb available RAM.

OpenVPN
And I have installed OpenVPN. It would be very nice with a VPN solution that works out of the box with iOS and Android, but that is PPTP (which I don’t want) or L2TP/IPSEC-solutions, which all seem very complicated and without really good support anyway. OpenVPN requires a separate App for iOS and Android, but whatever.

I followed the OpenWRT OpenVPN instructions. At first they seem complicated, but it was actually easy and successful. My only issue was that the router would not route VPN traffic to the internet. Turns out a Firewall rule was missing in the instructions (at least for me):

#/etc/config/firewall
config forwarding
	option src 'vpn'
	option dest 'wan'

And, the command “build-dh” which is supposed to take long time, took just over 60 minutes on this router.

I found that each client should have their own certificates (otherwise they get the same IP, which is bad).

Next practical question was what port and protocol should OpenVPN run? For me it is more important to always be able to connect, than to get most optimal performance. So I thought TCP/443 should be a safe choice (no one blocks that). Well, turns out there are firewalls that see the difference between HTTPS/SSL and OpenVPN/SSL and block the later. Some options could possibly be UDP/123 or UDP/53. OpenVPN over ICMP would be VERY nice.

I tried to configure a port forward on the OpenWRT router, to itself, to make OpenVPN operate on several ports. This seems to work very fine with TCP but not with UDP. Don’t really know why but I might find out some day. Alternatively I could run several instances of OpenVPN on different port/protocol combinations, but that would require more configuration (and resources) than just a port forward.

OpenWRT
I first installed BB RC1 (the full 16MB image) and later upgraded to BB RC2 (the smaller, upgrade image). Obviously, the configurations are kept, but all packages are lost – a good thing to know 😉 Well, all I need to do is exporting a list of all installed packages, before upgrade, and then run that list after upgrade. Guess I am not the first.

Also, release builds come with Luci (the web GUI) included, but trunk builds do not. I thought RC meant release candidate, implying that Luci would be included, but not so. However, very easy to find information on how to install Luci.

Benchmarking WDR4900
Benchmarks are tricky. I have a little C-program that is mostly CPU-dependent, not using floating point numbers and that outputs computation time (using clock_gettime so it should be accurate) for the problem given to it. I ran this program for problems small enough to run on my old WRT54GL, and compared the results of WRT54GL (200MHz Mips), WDR4900 (800MHz PowerPC) and an Apple PowerBook G4 (866MHz PowerPC) running Debian. In all cases I compliled with GCC and -Os (optimize for small binary). The 866MHz G4 is marginally faster than the 800MHz P1014. The PowerPCs are about 6 times faster than the old 200MHz Mips of the WRT54GL.

I have also found that the WDR4900 is about twice as fast as a Raspberry Pi for the above application.