After looking for quite a while for different solutions for my local router box, i decided to use an Soekris 4801 box. There are several advantages for this:

• It is fanless
• It can be run with CF Cards
• All hardware is supported by Open Source drivers

The 4801 has 3 ethernet ports using NatSemi DP8381 chips, which are (compared to the usual via chips) VLAN capable. Additional I bought a mini-PCI wireless card. First i had a RT61 based card, which i had problems with running Linux. Therefore i decided to buy another card, Atheros based. This one worked out of the box.

I decided to run OpenWRT on my box, for several reasons:

• support for OpenWRT is known to be quite good
• it is Linux based
• one can easyly install more software

For this box, i run SVN trunk on this box, which was, when i started based on release WhiteRussian. A short time later they started the development of Kamikaze, which was a mercy for me, the add-on package handling is really lovely. First i started with Nico’s packages but I soon decided to compile my own system from source. The packages can be found here.

One of harder parts (at least I found in the beginning) was the network configuration for the box, as OpenWRT default config still focuses on the Linksys WRT boxes. Therefore here comes my current config:

/etc/config/network

config interface loopback
	option ifname   lo
	option proto    static
	option ipaddr   127.0.0.1
	option netmask  255.0.0.0
config interface lan
	option ifname   eth1
	option proto    'static'
	option ipaddr   '10.9.0.1'
	option netmask  '255.255.255.0'
config interface wan
	option ifname   eth0
	option proto    pppoe
	option username "myISPlogin"
	option password "s3cr3t"
config interface phone
	option ifname   eth2
	option proto    static
	option ipaddr   10.9.1.1
	option netmask  255.255.255.0
config interface wlan
	option ifname   ath0
	option proto    static
	option ipaddr   10.9.2.1
	option netmask  255.255.255.0

/etc/config/wireless

config wifi-device wifi0
	option type atheros
	option channel 8
	option diversity 1
	option distance 100
	option txantenna 0
	option rxantenna 0
	option mode 11g
config wifi-iface
	option device wifi0
	option network wlan
	option mode ap
	option ssid myESSID
	option hidden 0
	option encryption psk2
	option key "iWILLnotTELLyou"