I had posted previously about setting up a WRT54G-TM running OpenWRT to be the router for my network. I thought it would be the perfect router, low power consumption, low heat, no moving parts, and wifi included. Unfortunately it did not work well at all. My advanced traffic shaping configuration killed the poor thing. 200MHz is apparently insufficient hurtz to handle the large number of interrupts for packet processing and marking. I was told it might be a driver issue, but I wasn’t aware of any other drivers that I could have loaded to offload those interrupts. So the system spent > 70% of it’s CPU time in System IRQ handling. When it was under heavy packet load, something the original router setup would’ve handled without batting an eye, it would drop connections and eventually die. It wouldn’t respond to pings, nor would it forward traffic adequately. NAT + Traffic shaping + bittorrents = DEATH. Not to mention that syslogd eventually threw the thing into a kernel panic. Oh, and the b43 driver also panicked the kernel soon after turning on the wifi.
So I’m back to the original setup, with an old (1998) left-over 2GB hard-drive, and a modified Source Mage install. It’s in good shape, with some tmpfs stuff for things that write to the disk in order to hopefully prolong the life of the disk. I took a clonezilla snapshot of it as well, so when the drive dies, I can throw in a new (also old, I have several 2 to 4 GB drives that are in the closet that still work) one, and the router will be back up in a few moments.
Whilst it was unfortunate that the router wasn’t a good fit for my particular use, perhaps I’ll find another use for it. Since there are two Serial ports trivially accessible on the device, perhaps I’ll get a GPS module and set it up in the car as a mobile automatic war-driving toy. I’ve found instructions to hook up an SD card to it as well, that would give it plenty of easy to replace storage.
It was an interesting experiment, and I’m somewhat sad it didn’t work out.
