Open Source Router Firmware OpenWRT 15.05 Released 94
aglider writes: The newest stable iteration of the famous and glorious OpenWRT has just been released in the wild for all the supported architectures. The latest version is 15.05, codenamed "Chaos Calmer" after a cocktail drink, just like all previous ones. Major changes from the official announcements: "Linux kernel updated to version 3.18. Improved Security Features. Rewritten package signing architecture based on ed25519. Added support for jails. Added support for hardened builds. Improved Networking Support. Platform and Driver Support." For the full details you are welcome on the forums while the firmware itself and extra packages are available from the distribution servers.
Do not want (Score:1, Funny)
If it has systemd, do not want.
Re: Do not want (Score:1)
Dropping syslog messages, stderr, and ignoring exit statuses would make it hard to troubleshoot. Your concern is valid.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Does OpenWRT have strace? Without strace, it is nearly impossible to track down problems when using systemd since it, as you noted, disregards so many of the UNIX standards.
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Just checked menuconfig in trunk. strace is a buildable package, so theoretically, yes.
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very cool.
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These diagnostics tools can help to scratch an itch but they are conceptually wrong. Thus the widespread decision in favor of systemd.
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These diagnostics tools can help to scratch an itch but they are conceptually wrong. Thus the widespread decision in favor of systemd.
Please explain.
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All handled differently, not centralized, difficult to find exactly what's needed, difficult to read or at least not standardized output. They are conceptually wrong because they are mostly without concept. journald fixes all that once you get used to it.
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All handled differently, not centralized, difficult to find exactly what's needed, difficult to read or at least not standardized output. They are conceptually wrong because they are mostly without concept. journald fixes all that once you get used to it.
Is this about the Borg vs humans?
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You don't want centralized. Ever. Monolithic is stupid when it comes to computers. See Microsoft Windows 10 Global Spyware Edition and how many of it's previous versions were botnets before Microsoft became the botnet itself.
https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-microsoft.html
http://www.computerworlduk.com/blogs/open-enterprise/how-can-any-company-ever-trust-microsoft-again-3569376/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
The Unix philosophy emphasizes building short, simple, clear, modular, and extensible code that can be easily maintained and repurposed by developers other than its creators. The Unix philosophy favors composability as opposed to monolithic design.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_(programming)
Modular programming is a software design technique that emphasizes separating the functionality of a program into independent, interchangeable modules, such that each contains everything necessary to execute only one aspect of the desired functionality.[1]
systemd should not exis
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Monolithic is stupid when it comes to computers
...he says, regarding an OS built on a monolithic kernel.
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You can very easily 24/7-365 take the kernel source in any Linux distro and compile it on any machine with any modules included or rejected that you want to.
The same goes for Linux routers and Android devices. You can remove all unwanted features and add every possible feature.
Try that in Windows. You can't.
I guess the words "Windows 10 Global Spyware Edition" triggered you. Is this an uncomfortable truth that your precious heart just cant bear to suffer? The only way I can imagine anybody defending GLO
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What tools can be used to troubleshoot random failed boots when using systemd?
Re: Do not want (Score:1)
there is one tool: use a different os. bsds, l4, write your own. the mainstream stuff including most unixoid kernels is deliberately insecure.
a secure c64 is more useful for germanic freedom than one of these swiss cheese ghz pentiums.
the mainstream stuff is part of the global pleb surveillance system.
linus now sounds like a member of the bushclintonkerry corruptocracy.
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Warning: This post contains buzzwords known to the state of California to cause cancer.
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Dropping syslog messages, stderr, and ignoring exit statuses would make it hard to troubleshoot. Your concern is valid.
AC - The concern is not valid. To be blunt, it's ignorant. Tired of this crap on /. Try systemd, you might like it. It takes a bit getting used to, however it's all still there. Fedora/rhel 7 still support rsyslog for example. I haven't found anything they broke, a lot they fixed and made better.
To me it's like you're arguing for a car that you still have to hand crank to start. Ok I suppose, there's clearly a better way now.
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It uses a simple sysv style init.
Re: Do not want (Score:1)
But systemd is the future. A future of dropping syslog messages, swallowing stderr, and returning a zero exit status even on failure.
Re: Do not want (Score:1)
Those are all concepts the systemd kids don't understand. If they don't get it then what hope do the average users of Linux have? I disagree with them, but they do have a point.
Re: Do not want (Score:1)
just use one of the bsds. more stable, more secure. linux by now has been subverted by the commies and the control freaks. those who believe in socializing your data for some sparta type goal.
linus sounds like a smug member of the corrupt elite by now.
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Dont worry, Lennart Poettering and his band of lunatics hasn't destroyed the embedded market yet - and the Android folks would just laugh at him if he tried.
Well, maybe we do want our interfaces to be named instead of eth0 en0po1po10s1po. Besure to pepper zeros and O's to make it impossible to retype.
One of my favorite quotes about systemd.
wrt1900ac (Score:2, Informative)
Yay! It seems these "made for open source" routers are finally supported!
However bug #20 and #21 mean Apple devices sometimes cause lock ups and nobody can fix the binary blob other than Marvell?
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However bug #20 and #21 mean Apple devices sometimes cause lock ups and nobody can fix the binary blob other than Marvell?
I've had Intel devices cause problems with the WiFi on some routers, and I've had to swap them out because my lady's Fujitsu T900 would cause the routers to hang.
Not a big deal. (Score:1)
Re:Not a big deal. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes there is... the exciting part would be the closing some of the one thousand open bugs and providing documentation.
Netgear DGND3700 v1 (Score:2, Insightful)
OpenWRT supports the router only but state that they will never support the DSL modem unfortunately.
Enjoy it while you can. (Score:5, Informative)
Just a reminder: http://tech.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
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Pure FUD. The FCC has no desire to get rid of openwrt. But, the claim that it does makes for good drama and everyone wants more drama.
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Your wrong. The people who are actually knowledge about this issue include lawyers at the EFF, Software Freedom Law Center, campaigns people at the FSF, software developers who were responsible for drivers/firmware for some of wifi cards with *the software defined radios* that the FCC has recently passed rules on and is proposing new rules on (Adrian Chadd & Luis R. Rodriuez), OpenWRT developers, libreCMC developers, CURRENT Qualcomm employees, *one of the largest companies manufacturing routers* (who c
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My what?
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Oh my God, thank you!
That slight grammatical error totally obviates any rational point poster has. Thanks to you, and you *alone*, I scrolled all the way back to the top to find out just what, the fuck, you were talking about.
You are the hero that nobody needs. At any time. Or any place
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There'll probably a huge (black?)market for used or surplus old wifi routers. And plenty of people buying low-watt single board computers like the Raspberry Pi. Which make me wonders if the FCC will modify their proposed rules so that only only the transmitter and support chips of a router board are locked down and not the whole device since it would be fairly trivial to make a wifi router out of USB Wifi dongles.
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The FCC only applies to 'Merica
This wont stop it, the amateur radio operators or the rest of the world.
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And in an ideal world this would be true.
Problem is the 'we only want to make one version' problem.
Easier to secure their own product line and get it certified everywhere than an 'FCC only' version.
There'll be open versions, we'll just loose easy and affordable access to gear we can secure and play with.
Doesn't matter for amateurs in Oz anyway, ACMA sold off a big chunk of the 13cm band anyway.
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Meanwhile, OpenWRT doesn't spy on you, and for the time being is secure.
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So did you really mean "pizzazz", as in "an attractive combination of vitality and glamour"? Or "pizzas". Because if you've figured out how to get a router firmware to spit out a pepperoni with extra cheese, then sir, your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
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Why is it crummy? Not app'd enough for you?
You won't be able to install OpenWRT much longer (Score:5, Interesting)
There has been a lot of misinformation being spread by certain technical news publications about proposed rule changes. The FCC has passed rules and is proposing new rules that are *resulting in* manufacturers locking down there devices so that users can't flash OpenWRT and other third party firmware. See www.savewifi.org for more information on how you can help stop the *proposed rule changes* NOW. The rules which have already passed are also a problem and there will be further efforts to get them overturned.
We are already seeing manufacturers add signature checking (locks) to the stock firmware they ship on *older routers* as a result of the re-certification process. Manufacturers are asked "How are you preventing the loading of third party firmware such as DD-WRT?". The FCC has been quoted saying that they don't care how its achieved, but the reality is the quick and easy way and really only way for most/all manufactures to comply with these rule changes *in practice* is to lock the devices down. The FCC quotes are misleading to those who don't understand this and at least two articles have used this to imply it is not an issue despite *many* people saying it is an important issue (even within these articles).
There have been quotes from Qualcomm employees as well to add "clout" to the stories. These quotes were BS. The people at Qualcomm involved in the campaign, knowledgeable, and fully informed were not the people quoted. There is one current employee and actual ex-Qualcomm developers who worked on the software defined radio wifi chips now being impacted participating in the Save Wifi campaign. Adrian Chadd has reviewed the rule changes and is *working on the Save Wifi campaign*. Don't trust my words- go look at the PUBLIC mailing list archive yourself.
Lawyers, activists, and technologists from a variety of groups who have worked on FCC rule changes in the past are also involved in the campaign. They're not agreeing with the assessment that this is a non-issue or being blown out of proportion. The Electronic Frontier Foundation AND the Free Software Foundation are both involved and *big* participants in deciphering the rule changes. They are both coming out with statements as part of the Save Wifi campaign. The Save Wifi coalition is preparing letters and setting up a campaign similar to Dear FCC, SOPA, and similar campaigns to fight this.
The current proposed rules are what are currently at issue for the campaign, but there will be efforts to overturn rules already passed, and stop similar rules from going through in both Europe and Canada. It's no surprise that there is so much confusion as it's taken a month and participation by a dozen *highly involved* participants from different areas to grasp the significance of the problem and are still figuring out a road map on fighting it.
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Surely this won't stop manufacturers from shipping routers with OpenWRT built in? (Well, I guess it will if OpenWRT is GPLv3, but that should be easily fixed.)
OPenWRT will never die. (Score:2)
Why? Because a router is just a computer with multiple network cards/wifi cards. To have a new routerrun it just build a small computer.
OpenWRT vs DD-WRT (Score:2)
Do these groups communicate at all? I ask because I have the Buffalo WZR-1750DHPD router that comes with DD-WRT straight from the factory. Full open source, etc.
And OpenWRT doesn't really support this router. The comments in the HW database are:
As of OpenWrt 15.05-rc3 (Chaos Calmer):
The 802.11an radio is not recognized.
The 802.11bg radio is misconfigured such that most wireless clients will connect to the AP with only a very weak signal.
Which strikes me as odd for a device that already has an open source implementation. You'd figure getting a basic function like the Wi-Fi drivers working would be fairly easy, given a working sample with source.
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Your device has a broadcom soc. Broadcom has always been shitty about their drivers. AFAIK broadcom just shoves a binary blob at router manufacturers for the radio driver, so they have to design a firmware around it and can't modify broadcom's closed driver. k2.4 and k2.6 based broadcom router firmwares usually use this shitty broadcom closed radio driver. k3x uses an open third party radio driver. This might be part of the reason why OpenWRT doesn't claim to support your device.
I'm still rockin my old
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I have been running OpenWRT on my Asus RT-N16 for a while now. First OpenWRT 14.07 (Barrier Breaker) and now OpenWRT 15.05 (Chaos Calmer) and it works like a charm. OpenWRT is the most stable alternative firmware I have ever used (compared to SveaSoft, DD-WRT, Tomato Toastman and Tomato Shibby).
You’re right that Broadcom is a pain in the ass and my next router will have an Atheros chip. But if you don’t mind using closed source drivers the Asus RT-N16 works like a charm with OpenWRT.
For anyone w
Re:OpenWRT vs DD-WRT (Score:4, Informative)
comes with DD-WRT straight from the factory. Full open source, etc.
No, dd-wrt cannot be considered a fully open source project, as Openwrt is. See "Building_DD-WRT_from_Source" [dd-wrt.com]. And an excerpt:
Building DD-WRT from source is difficult and according to the text here definitly not working on first try. You will see lots of strange errors and many confusing install-scripts. The forum is full of people who were not able to make this install-procedure running through. The infos in the forum is much newer than these here, but also very confusing and mixed up. (...) Brainslayer does not have the time to do everything ...
dd-wrt really looks like more of a closed project, that still benefits from the historical confusion related to is-it-or-not-open-source. This other quote from dd-wrt wiki [dd-wrt.com] is interesting
At present DD-WRT is available for free, although a different business model is being drafted by BrainSlayer in order to pay his salary, as this is his full time job
. And it seems dd-wrt makes arrangements with some wrt makers - this is why their firmware is available sometimes way before Openwrt.
... never a problem, stable, efficient. I even compiled the huge source to change the way dhcp delivers info to clients. I was amazed as how the projects is clean, compiles flawlessly. A good old open source. The Openwrt volunteers put a lot of work into these small devices, and they deliver. I don't think the bigger success of dd-wrt compared to Openwrt is legitimate.
I tried to install dd-wrt - because for some reasons it's what recommend people in forums - on some routers, and always had a problem: either instability, settings disappearing after a few reboots, features missing...
On the other hand, Openwrt is fully open source and is easily customizable. Installed it on many routers, including for friends, shops
Re:OpenWRT vs DD-WRT (Score:5, Interesting)
You're confusing "not open source" with "sloppy mess". From the same link you sent:
DD-WRT is a third party developed firmware released under the terms of the GPL for many IEEE 802.11a/b/g/h/n wireless routers based on a Broadcom or Atheros chip reference design.
Here is a tutorial on compiling DD-WRT from source: http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=269372 [dd-wrt.com]
The business model doesn't change the GPL nature. Brainslayer arranged professional versions with customization for commercial applications. (Note: Stock, GPL DD-WRT works find on the Buffalo WZR-1750, so it isn't a matter of close-source tweaks.)
I'm interested in OpenWRT because it *is* a cleaner code base and more modular in nature. I like the idea of the packages vs a monolithic system. But that doesn't address the question of why one GPL project has working code for a particular system and another can't use it for their own GPL implementation.
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Do these groups communicate at all? I ask because I have the Buffalo WZR-1750DHPD router that comes with DD-WRT straight from the factory. Full open source, etc.
That's because DD-WRT is not "full open source, etc." It's open source Linux, but closed source device drivers. It comes from Linus's "pragmatic" desire for Linux to be used, with no interest in the political reasons for the GPL.
I don't know the process at OpenWRT exactly, but they tend to use open source drivers more than DD-WRT does. On the minus side, this means it supports much fewer devices. On the plus side, this means "supported" devices really are supported and have updates available to them, while
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Thank you. That makes sense.
But the routers themselves suck (Score:2)
We are three sharing an apartment, with three laptops, a Raspberry Pi, three phones, and the occasional guest. We've gone through several D-Link and TP-Link routers. The WiFi quality sucks, there's crappy, dropping reception 5m (15 ft) from the router beyond a wall.
What router can we buy? Do Open/DD-WRT affect performance?
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I currently have a D-Link DIR-685 (which works ok 80% of the time). There's a TP-Link WR941ND and a W8951ND which doubled as an ADSL modem. We've gone through a couple more which we don't have anymore. All with stock firmware.
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Wifi quality depends mostly on receiver sensitivity, antenna design and positioning. Unfortunately most people go for <TimTaylor>more power<TimTaylor> instead. Cranking up the power increases the noise, especially if you overdrive the output stage. Lowering the power often gives you a cleaner signal that you can then focus with a directional antenna to get the same output power in the direction where you need good coverage. That same antenna will also lower the total received noise, because it t
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All neighbors are older, youngest kids are in the 8-10 year old range.
Leaky microwave - it's possible.
Directional antenna - tinfoil style? Or does it require a purchase?
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Move your AP to channel 11. Trust me on this one.
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I dealt with this for years with D-Link and Linksys (now bought by Cisco) access points. They had all kinds of problems, and I was constantly rebooting them. At one point, I went so far as to wire a relay into a power strip, hook it up via serial cable to a computer, and wrote a script to monitor the access point and reset the power when it got too shitty (at least once a day). A couple of years ago, I bought an Apple Airport Express and an HP Procurve 1410-8G switch (the Airport Express only has somethi
FCC rules not the problem (Score:1)
Radio firmware is commonly already separated from system firmware. The problem is the manufacturers who won't just make this standard. If you can't reflash the radios, then there's no problem.
I'm a bit freaked out at the moment (Score:3, Funny)
I just updated a router with a complicated configuration (several wireless networks, manual firewall configuration, switch configured with multiple VLANs, web interface through ssh only, wireless on a channel outside of 1-11, etc.) from Barrier Breaker to Chaos Calmer, and absolutely everything just keeps working. I want to complain about this somehow, because it freaks me the hell out, but I don't know what to complain about. What the fuck, folks.