On moving

We've (mostly) moved to a new (to us) residence.

Getting out of the old house has been slow, but we do have a deadline, as the old house is under contract to sell at a substantial discount under what it would be worth if fixed up. Nearly everything is out. We're left with gardening tools and supplies, hand tools and a few odds and ends. The rest we'll likely leave behind because the contract allows that.

At this point I think all of our books are out. About half the artwork is out.

We're still getting things sorted in the new place, still painting here and there, still finding new places to put old things.

I'd like to carve out more time for the life-enriching things I consider important. I have ten things on my list. I'd like to touch on more than three each day.

We gave up on AT&T for DSL. We gave up on AT&T altogether, because they botched the move order for the analog land line and after spending hours trying to get someone who both cared and knew what they were doing, I gave up on them. Now we're with Cox (😐) for internet, at the lowest pricing tier. They haven't introduced hard data caps here, but since they sort of talk of having a 1TB cap, what's the point of having faster service if it's possible to hit the cap at the lowest tier of service if one were to run it flat-out for a whole month? I hope that having Cox for internet is a better experience than having them for cable TV was.

We're still a cut-cord household - we had an antenna installed and it's hard to be happier with it. All the local channels we care about come through splendidly.

We giving up AT&T we also gave up the landline number I'd had for a long time. With all the junk calls it received, this isn't that much of a loss. It does mean relying more on mobile phones and the attendant per-minute charges, but even with a pay-for-what-one-uses plan (yay Ting!), we pay less than we would with an "unlimited" plan with one of the big carriers. VoIP like Google Voice fills part of the gap.

With Cox internet, OpenWRT would panic reboot when starting WoW. I haven't yet determined why. Connecting our actual WiFi access point directly to the cable modem was fine, though.

OpenWRT Chaos Calmer 15.05.1

A few weeks ago I updated my Linksys WRT600N to OpenWRT Chaos Calmer 15.05.1. I wrote first about using OpenWRT on a WRT600N back in October 2015.

First I downloaded the bundle most appropriate for my model of router, then updated through the OpenWRT web interface. The only downside was that my custom-installed packages went away, so I lost my stats reporting installation. I reinstalled most of the packages I'd had installed prior to the update, but didn't recreate the stats setup.

Note to self: record the list of installed packages before the next update.

The router itself is running swimmingly. I wish I could say the same for the DSL (which I get through a reseller, so I don't have to deal directly with the ILEC's terrible customer service), which has a hiccup every few days and has to renegotiate a connection. I wish we had a choice here of something other than DSL or the cable TV company for wired Internet.

I promised to discuss the features I use most.

I have the router configured to NAT the public connection. What I use most is the realtime traffic monitor display, to show overall bandwidth usage and high traffic targets. I also have swap configured on a USB thumb drive in case of memory shortfall, as the WRT600N doesn't have much RAM.

OpenWRT on a Linksys WRT600N v1.1

Note: At first blush, it does not appear that OpenWRT supports the 5GHz radio. This is fine for my application, as I have another wireless router.

I've been running OpenBSD as my firewall, but have often had performance problems on the old hardware on which I run it. While searching for an alternative, I decided to revisit possibilities for the Linksys WRT600N wireless router I've had in storage since I replaced it with something with better 5GHz and 802.11n performance. I had been running DD-WRT on it, but maintenance of that release fell by the wayside several years ago.

OpenWRT, on which DD-WRT is reported to be based, appears to have a more active development community. I discovered that version 1.1 of the WRT600N, with serial numbers starting with "MNR0", has been supported since version 14.07 of OpenWRT.

I still had a copy of the original firmware, downloaded from Linksys when they made it easy to find, so I loaded that, replacing the DD-WRT image. I set the load to switch to factory defaults.

The latest version of OpenWRT is distributed in the TRX format, so requires conversion for the stock Linksys firmware to be able to process an update, which must be in BIN format. The OpenWRT ticketing system has a case concerning this and here is a direct link to the conversion tool in base64 format. This tool is a 32-bit x86 Linux executable, so I had to install 32-bit glibc.

The resulting file installed smoothly from the Linksys firmware's update page.

A subsequent post will discuss configuration of features of interest to me.