Open Source Firmware Gave My Wireless Router Superpowers!

I have a shop about 50 feet from my house. It has a metal roof and metal siding, so it's pretty much a Faraday cage unless you stand at the wooden door facing the house. On my long list of projects was a task to extend ethernet to the shop so I could listen to podcasts when I work in there. Given how much time I actually spend in the shop, that task was pretty low on the list. I was about to buy a wireless bridge, when I stumbled upon a Netgear R8000 tri-band wireless router at a thrift store for $30. It had a note on it saying that the owners got Starlink and didn't need this any more. I figured I didn't need anything high-end and at that price, I'd just buy the router.

Then it dawned on me. Could I use this router to act as a WiFi bridge, similar to the way mesh routers work? That would save me a whole lot of time trenching and burying cable. Alas, the stock software didn't do that. So I checked to see if any open source router firmware were available for this router, since alternative firmware are typically more capable than stock firmware. Luckily, OpwnWrt had been ported to this model. I knew OpenWrt supports lots of features and could probably do what I wanted it to.

Why use OpwnWrt?

OpenWrt has more features than most consumer routers. Most consumer routers do just fine as your home Internet router. Out of the box, they provide wireless Internet throughout your home, offer a guest network to isolate visitors or even the posibly insecure Internet of Things devices from the rest of your home computers, and many even offer basic Network Attached Storage capability.

What does OpenWrt offer in addition to that basic functionality? For starters, you can add multiple VLANs each with its own wireless SSID to your network so that wireless devices can be placed in different subnets with different security policies. You can use USB modems such as phone tether or LTE or 5G modems, and set quotas on bandwidth usage. Block ads at the router. You can have multiple WAN connections. You can install additional applications and run scripts at certain times of day. Possibly most importantly, security updates are made regularly. If your router is no longer supported by its manufacturer with firmware updates, you may have known security vulnerabilities in a critical piece of your home infrastructure, and these could be remedied by running alternative firmware that is being updated regularly. There is a lot you can do with OpenWrt, but it's not necessarily easy, and it isn't availble for every router.

OpenWrt Is Not For Everyone

If you are the type of person who just wants to plug something in, run a setup wizard, and leave it alone, then OpenWrt is probably not for you. It will help to be well versed in networking, and being familiar with editing configuration files. If you like tinkering or perhaps building things with a Raspberry Pi, then you can probably get OpenWrt to do what you want. (You could even make an OpenWRT router with your Raspberry Pi.)

Installing OpenWrt

Installing the firmware was fairly straight forward once I identified which firmware image was appropriate for my router. I just uploaded the new firmware file on the Netgear firmware update page, and waited for the reboot. (Different routers have different install processes, so make sure to follow the directions for your specific router exactly to prevent turning your router into a plastic brick.) After rebooting, the router was runiing its new operating system.

Setting up a WiFi Extender/Repeater

I didn't want a router, though, I wanted an access point with a brdige between a client (or station) running on one radio and an access point (or master) on the other two radios. I wanted the wired ports to be on the same LAN as the two master radios. There isn't a button or switch in the UI that sets or enables this behavior. You have to manually set the different interfaces and radio features, assign each interface to a network, download additional software to relay packets between the network the WiFi client is on and the network the other two radios and wired ports were assigned to, and set all the addressing appropriately. It sounds complicated, but fortunately the OpenWrt team have documentation on how to do all this. I followed the documentation found here for my particular setup.

Was it worth it?

I absolutely think it was worth it! I got Internet in my shop for just $30, saved lots of time and money by not trenching and laying cable, and at over 100mbps, the network access in my shop is nice to have at a very affordable price. I can now make phone calls and listen to streaming radio or podcasts and access my LubeLogger instance (more on that at a later date).

What do you think?

Do you use an alternative firmware for your router? What superpowers do you take advantage of?

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