Cox update

Cox is raising the price of the lowest internet service tier, with no indication where the increase in rate is going, and my attempts to learn that have gone nowhere.

We really need competition in the ISP space. Two incumbents, one cable, one DSL/"fiber", do not constitute competition.

Cox Update

Cox introduced a hard data cap of 1TB per month, after which they will charge US$10 for each 50GB of data.

Thus there is no point in paying for more than the lowest tier, where it would require running the service flat-out for almost a whole month to exceed the limit.

Data caps suck.

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.