Most wireless routers these days have web interfaces can share USB hard drives, have firewalls and so on.
OpenWrt is an open-source firmware that can be installed on such routers. It started thanks to Linksys using GPL software on it’s WRT54G router and had to release the source. This was the base for the project.
OpenWrt is a minimized linux based on the Busybox distribution that can run on the limited hardware of the devices. Thus the devices become a lot more flexible – ssh, telnet, portforwarding, iptables, firewall and so on.
The current version of OpenWrt is 8.09.01, code-named Kamikaze. They use cocktail names for code-names, the last one was called White Russian.
Another project, x-wrt, uses OpenWrt as a base and creates an elaborate web interface, called webif2, that allows the configuration of router via a web interface for users not familiar with linux. x-wrt uses the same version numbers when they bundle their web interface with OpenWrt.
I’ve used x-wrt 7.09 with webif (version 1) which had it’s glitches. Now I’m using OpenWrt 8.09 that provides its own web interface (quite good really). I haven’t tried webif2. But if I do, I’ll try to write something about it.
What about routers?
The starting point is the table of harware section in OpenWrt’s wiki. For every major manifacturer they have a wiki page with info whether they support the router and how good they support it. My router for example is supported fully with OpenWrt based on linux kernel 2.4. They don’t support the wireless (some binary driver issue) with kernel 2.6. So I’m using the latest version of OpenWrt, but with an older kernel.
Some routers have USB ports which can be used for harddrives, flash memories, usb cameras. For my router they have a manual for live streaming from a web camera. USB harddrives can be shared via ftp, samba…. (it’s a linux box after all).
The pro’s of these machines is that they’re cheap, very powerful, and very quiet.
The con’s come from limited memory (can be extended with a flash), lack of all linux commands and options (busybox).
