Brad Midgley wrote: > I have a few little linux computers with arm cpus that can do usb host, > so I thought I would set up an access point that way for custom stuff, > similar to your idea except these are slower. I figured it would uplink > through bluetooth to a phone or something. > > I found there are no decent drivers for usb wifi adapters. Nothing I > could find can do master mode in particular. > > I'm also curious to see what you come up with.
Here's the word so far. The easy stuff is all done. I bought a little Alix board that's an AMD Geode processor (400 MHz) with 256 MB of ram, although 128 would do. I bought an Atheros MiniPCI card to go with it for the wireless part. Stuck this in a little case and now I have a 6"x6"x2" router with at present a single antenna sticking out the back. Will do dual later. Total price $230. With the 128MB ram version, I think it could be done for right around $200 if you shopped around a bit for the other parts like the case (prices vary dramatically) and the antennas and pigtails. That latest trunk of OpenWRT Kamikaze happens to support the Alix as a profile (mainly just includes a couple of needed kernel drivers modules). So I downloaded the source, filled the package tree, and configured the thing. Made sure the Atheros wireless stuff was being built, included WebIf2 (X-wrt.org), and built an image, which I wrote to a compact flash card. So far my image is 48 MB, but I think I'll eventually create a 64 MB or 128 MB one, depending on the blacklists that are desired. Anyway, I got the router up and running. Used a serial console to get it all working initially. As configured by default, the ethernet ports weren't set up at all really. OpenWRT emulates vlans, so I created a vlan (these are really just bridging groups on this machine, not vlans like on the linksys) call LAN and put ports 2 and 3 in that. Made port 1 be the wan port. Then I got the atheros wireless working, and stuck it in the bridge lan, which is the default behavior on most routers. I edited config files to do this, but found out later that the web interface can do all of that. So now it's to the point where it's a full wireless router with all the functionality of a linksys. Today I build packages (all part of the OpenWRT build system) for tinyproxy and dansguardian. My next step is to set it up manually and then test it. I am confident it will run fine. After that, it's time to build or adapt a web client for dansguardian. If anyone wants, I'll be happy to send them my openwrt build config file, and default uci config files for network and wireless, or a prebuilt image. I'm very happy with this Alix deal so far and doubt I will ever mess about with Linksys or Asus or whatever routers again. It's so nice to have all th storage I want and lots of power to burn, only for about twice the price! I have enough space to put on python and get some real scripting done in a hurry. The most important thing, of course, is a full version vim. In the next month, watch for an Asus 500G Premium being sold cheap (running Kamikaze itself, of course). /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
