Tag: Router

Link: Debian Linux Home Router with IPv4 and IPv6

I use Debian Wheezy for a home router with an he.net IPv6 tunnel. Here are the configs I have in place for this to work!

Note: This is not a full how-to guide but rather a dump of config files. Hopefully this will be of use to fellow Linux geeks out there. I am using a /24 class B because I do not like to use 192.168.x.x.

Full article here:
Debian Linux Home Router with IPv4 and IPv6

Link: Setting up a Raspberry Pi as a WiFi access point

Would you like to use your Pi as a WiFi router? Or maybe have it as a special filtering access point? Setting up a Pi as an access point (AP) is a bit more advanced than using it as a client, but its still only a half hour of typing to configure. If you want to, this tutorial will make it so the Pi broadcasts a WiFi service and then routes internet traffic to an Ethernet cable. Since its all Linux you can go in and update or configure it however you like.

I used the following pages as a guide to create this tutorial, please note many of them will not work completely, but check them out if you are interested!

Currently tested working on Raspbian only

Full article here:
Setting up a Raspberry Pi as a WiFi access point (Adafruit Learning System)

We would not purchase a Raspberry Pi solely for this purpose, since you can probably buy a dedicated router that will act as an wireless access point for less than the price of a Raspberry Pi, power supply, SD Card, and WiFi adapter. But if you already have a Raspberry Pi that is loafing along doing some task that doesn’t make full use of its capabilities, this might be an extra task you could give it, particularly if it happens to be in a spot where WiFi reception is a bit spotty.

Unbricking a Router With a Raspberry Pi using JTAG (links)

This is a tale of how someone remembered that he had a non-functional router, in this case an older Linksys WRT54G, and…

… decided he would have a go at repairing this ancient router. There was only one problem: the most popular utility for programming the router through the JTAG header required a PC parallel port.

Unfortunately, parallel ports are becoming as hard to find as floppy disk drives these days, but did that deter him? No way, he simply added Raspberry Pi support to the debricking utility, and used the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins to do the job.  Unfortunately, in the end he was unsuccessful, but only because he physically damaged the circuity on the router while attempting to upgrade the RAM – had he not attempted the hardware modification, this likely would have worked.  So, although we make no guarantees, if you have a bricked router, read the articles linked below and maybe you can bring it back to life.

Unbricking a Router With a Raspi (Hack A Day)
Debrick WRT54GL using Raspberry Pi (JTAG bit banging) (Oxblog)

How to isolate a second router from the rest of your local network

 

Important
This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared on a blog called The Michigan Telephone Blog, which was written by a friend before he decided to stop blogging. It is reposted with his permission. Comments dated before the year 2013 were originally posted to his blog.

I was recently asked how to solve a particular problem and I came up with what I think is an interesting solution, especially given my overall rather limited knowledge of networking.  The issue was this: In the home in question, they have cable broadband and a router that feeds jacks throughout the house.  For security reasons, the homeowner never installed any kind of wireless networking (even though his primary router supports it, he keeps it turned off).  Also his primary router is down in the basement.

Recently he got his wife a Motorola XOOM table computer and wouldn’t you know, it requires Wi-Fi access to connect to the Internet.  In order to extend the range, and so that he or his wife could easily turn off the Wi-Fi when the XOOM isn’t in use, he bought a second Wi-Fi router and put it upstairs.  Note that this router is connected BEHIND the original router in the basement.  In other words, the sequence of connection is as follows:

Cable Modem —> Basement (Primary) Router —> Upstairs (Wi-Fi) Router —> Tablet Computer

Now, as I said, he is very security conscious.  So the question he asked me is, if someone managed to break into his Wi-Fi, is there a way to set it up so that they could ONLY get to the Internet, and not to any other system on his local network.  I said I didn’t know, but to first try accessing other machines on his network (the ones that had web interfaces, anyway) from the XOOM.  Turned out that he could do so without any problem.  Because the Wi-Fi router used a different network segment from the original (addresses in the 192.168.2.x range, whereas the original router handed out address in the 192.168.0.x range), as far as anything connected to the Wi-Fi router was concerned, anything on the primary router might as well have been on the Internet (please forgive the non-technical explanation, I’m probably missing several technical details here, but that’s the gist of the problem).

I didn’t think it would be a good idea to try to make the Wi-Fi router use the same address space for both WAN and LAN, and while I could assign it a static IP address on the WAN side, it had to be able to reach the router/gateway at 192.168.0.1.  So here is what we did.

On the PRIMARY router, we took a look at the LAN settings and found that its DHCP server was assigning addresses starting at 192.168.0.2.  We changed that to start at 192.168.0.5 (probably could have used 192.168.0.4 in retrospect).

This way, we could change the WAN address of the Wi-Fi router to use a STATIC IP address of 192.168.0.2, and (this is the important part) a NETMASK of 255.255.255.252.

This means that as far as the Wi-Fi router is concerned, there are only four valid IP addresses in the 192.168.0.x range:

192.168.0.0 (not used)
192.168.0.1 (primary router/gateway)
192.168.0.2 (Wi-Fi router)
192.168.0.3 (Reserved for “broadcast” as far as Wi-Fi router is concerned)

One thing to remember is that after changing the DHCP assignment on the PRIMARY router is that computers already using IP address 192.168.0.2 and 192.168.0.3 will not automatically vacate those addresses until their DHCP lease comes up for renewal.  So if you change the second router’s WAN address to 192.168.0.2, it may not actually be able to connect until the computer or device currently on 192.168.0.2 “loses its lease”.  Rebooting the primary router may help, but in some cases you may have to track down the computer with the conflicting address and shut it off, or if you know how, renew its IP address assignment (this can usually be done from within the network settings panel).  Eventually, though, it should work, and at that point you should find that devices connected to the secondary router cannot connect to any addresses in the 192.168.0.x range outside the three mentioned above, which means they won’t be able to “see” anything else on your network that’s been assigned a DHCP address.

This tip falls into the category of “it worked in this particular situation, but I don’t guarantee it will work for you”.  So if you try this, be sure to test to make sure that the other machines on your primary network are actually unreachable from the secondary router.

Now let the comments begin, telling me how there’s a better way to do this, or why it won’t work, or something to that effect…