So, I have now a Linksys WRT54GL v1.1 router here that links the DSL router via WiFi with the cabled LAN connected to the 8-port switch. I had to flash it with OpenWRT firmware from day one, as the routing I needed wasn’t available from original LinkSys interface (as it wasn’t on the Belkin and in any other WAN router I found); I followed this HowTo when I set it up, but this way I actually had the 4-ports switch as an extension of the 8-port one, too, creating a 10-ports switch, not something I wanted. What I would have liked was having the 4-ports switch as an extension of the WLAN network, for external laptops that I need to connect wiredly.
So last night, after having set up dnsmasq to act as my main DNS server, and after writing a dyndns-updater with web IP detection and cache support in SH (extending this one) and configuring it, I decided to change the interfaces so that I could use the WAN port of the router to connect this LAN and bridge the wireless with the other four ports. Bad idea, it simply disabled the client mode for wireless, but when I was reconfiguring it to work again without the bridge, I’ve unfortunately typed the wrong command, and committed to nvram both lan and wan on the WLAN port 🙁
Trying to get it to work, I ended up flashing it back again, and resetting the NVRAM entirely, then I reconfigured it and everything worked, at least 🙂 I also reconfigured dnsmasq, although I still have to do the next step, that is configuring this network on DHCP with fixed addresses.
I’m also wondering if I can use it as VPN server to allow the laptop connected to the Wireless, or to an external network, to connect on the LAN .. but I’m not sure if it has enough power to do that. If somebody ever tried, with bad or good results, I’ll be glad to hear comments 🙂
Update: for who was wondering, I’ve uploaded my modified dyndns-updater script that can use web IP gather method, and that caches the IP so that it does not get updated more than once with the same address.
