Like most home internet users, I have a dynamic IP address and I use Dyndns to map it to a static host name so that I can remotely access my router (and computers behind it) without having to know its current IP address.
My router is a LinkSys WRT54G, which is running the OpenWrt custom firmware. OpenWrt comes with a package called ez-ipupdate, which can be configured to automatically update your Dyndns host record whenever the router’s address changes. For detailed instructions, see the DDNSHowTo page in the OpenWrt wiki.
The instructions in OpenWrt’s wiki are pretty good but they don’t deal with the situation where the time between address changes is greater than 30 days. …Continue reading » How to Force ez-ipupdate to Touch Dyndns Record Every Month
Just for laughs, I recently created a point-to-point VPN (a.k.a. gateway-to-gateway VPN) between my home and the office. At the office, the VPN endpoint is a LinkSys RV042, which, as far as I can tell, runs Freeswan VPN software. At home, the VPN endpoint is a LinkSys WRT54GL, which I hacked to run the OpenWrt linux distribution and OpenSwan VPN software. A future post will detail exactly how I did this but the purpose of this post is to discuss how I got my Windows file shares to work across the VPN. …Continue reading » Accessing Windows Shares Across a VPN
I have a LinkSys WRT54G router which runs OpenWrt (version White Russian RC5). For console access to the router, I have enabled the Dropbear SSH server, which works well.
Recently, I opened up the SSH port to allow remote access to the console. To secure this as best I could, I disabled password authentication and enabled public key authentication, by following the instructions in the Dropbear Public Key Authentication Howto.
After doing disabling password authentication, I thought to myself “What if I lose my private key?” The answer is “I’m probably screwed”, because there is no serial port on the WRT54G for local access. (Actually, there are some hardware mods you can do to add a serial port but I’m not that handy or brave).
So I thought to myself “Would’t it be great if you could configure Dropbear to disallow password authentication for remote connections but allow it for local connections?” …Continue reading » Disabling Password Authentication on Dropbear SSH Server in OpenWrt Running on WRT54G
I installed Tinyproxy 1.6.3 on my LinkSys WRT54GS router today. Following are some installation notes and comments about Tinyproxy.
My router currently runs the White Russian RC5 release of the OpenWrt Linux distribution. Tinyproxy is not yet an officially supported OpenWrt package. Rather, it is part of the “backports” package repository. To install Tinyproxy, I first had to add the backports repository to my repository list by adding the following line to my /etc/ipkg.conf file: …Continue reading » Tinyproxy on WRT54GS
