computoman

Openwrt is a very well known firmware for commercial routers. What a lot of people may not know is that it is available for the personal computer environment. In fact, you can find more about it here: http://www.instructables.com/id/Openwrt-on-a-pc/ But now there is an offshoot of Openwrt called Gargoyle ( http://www.gargoyle-router.com/ ). Like Openwrt, they both can run in a virtual machine! So you could run several routers all on one system. That is something so far you can not do on a commercial plastic router. Hopefully, I will be doing an install set up soon. If you can do the openwrt install, then the gargoyle install should be easy. If you go to their download page, you can easily choose the right firmware to download for an X86 system. Linux users will want to have the software dd available to transfer the image to a drive. You do get a gui interface to interact with remotely like most routing software, That way you are not locked into the command line. G...

More and more of the plastic routers you get from a retailer are limiting you from installling a third party firmware to make the unit more valuable. So it is nice you can put an old pc back to work and install the same kind of firmware you would put on the store bought routers. Also with the pc you can swap the nic cards for better nics without getting a whole new system. Pulled out of the closet the pc I was using as a router and found that a few things have changed. I just went ahead and installed the latest openwrt kamikaze image on the system. What does the system have? Intel PII 266 mhz with 192 meg ram. The openwrt hard drive is only 2 gig. Thinking about using another case. The system actually has two drives. one with a minimal Debian linux to be able to get the latest image or dd (or install) to the openwrt drive. The Debian linux drive is usally left unconnected. First thing I did was to change the dead motherboard battery.  Second  thing I did was change the passwor...

This section requires knowledge of bash. Please get a professional to help if you are unsure. The root partition of the official x86 OpenWrt image is not very big, about 50 MiB.  Many find it too small after installing a few add-on packages.  Here I will cover the steps to expand it.  The resultant image can be used in a live USB (see Easy Live USB for x86 OpenWRT ) or copied to a hard disk. Procedure Outline Get an uncompressed disk image. Pad image to desired size Attach the image file to a loop device Edit image partition table to enlarge the root partition Resize the file system in root partition Detach the image from the loop device. All commands below are run in Bash. Uncompress Image File Use whichever method you like to download an image file from OpenWrt ( http://downloads.openwrt.org ) and uncompress it using gzip.  For example, these two commands download and uncompress the 10.03.1-rc6 disk image. bash$ wget --quiet http:/...

Installing OpenWrt x86 This is a great project to put an old pc back to work. Openwrt is a cousin so to speak of DD-WRT that  is installed on many brand name routers to increase their capabilities. Openwrt will also allow a pc to act as an expensive router without the big price tag. Of course, you could easy use some of the router distros such as ipcop and many others (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_router_or_firewall_distributions ). openwrt is so much more upgradeable and expandable. Did this with the original image on a pentium2 and it worked well. If you want the gui, you may need to install the web add-on. Installing OpenWrt x86 on a PC. ( Try this at your own risk!!! ) Requirements: An X86 compatible pc (i386) or greater with at least 16MB of RAM, 2 network cards, and a hard drive. With newer versions of openwrt require higher hardware requirements. Check openwrt.org for more details. OpenWrt binary file, for x86. Old: http://downloads.openwrt.org/kamika...