Flashing a WRT54G router (with v7.00.1 firmware) with a linux firmware?

You can get a brand new WRTG54 (or some other equivalent) for $40 (used ones you can get for $0-$20), it's the size of a paperback book, it's completely silent, it only burns about 5 Watts.

Which cost somewhere between $300-$1000, is a _lot_ larger, has annoying fans, and burns about 20X the power.

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That is indeed great.

except the linux firewall box can do all sorts of other things, it does not have to be dedicated.

i

It does have to be on all the time, which can be annoying when you need to rebuild/upgrade that machine and the others can't get to the 'net until that job is done.

There are also people who are too paranoid to have a "general purpose" Lintel box connected to the internet. The thought being that a dedicated, single-purpose box (running a non-IA32 architecture) will be much harder to exploit than an IA32 box with a lot of huge, complex applications and services running on it. I'm not sure there's a lot to that argument.

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On Tue, 25 Sep 2007 19:46:53 -0500 in comp.os.linux.networking, Ignoramus30458 spake unto us, saying:

But it does have to be ON. :-)

I just picked up a Linusys WRT54G v8.0 (yeah, I know I should've gotten the GL instead) WAP/router/firewall mainly to free up my old Linux f/w box, and I think it's nice to be able to multiboot again w/o canning my internet connection...

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 -Rich Steiner >>>---> http://www.visi.com/~rsteiner >>>---> Mableton, GA USA
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I do not have a habit of turning computers off (except for my linux laptop).

Without a doubt.

How can I tell if my WRT54G supports embedded Linux? Maybe I should take it off eBay.

i

There is plenty of truth to that argument - there is little doubt that an x86 machine has more attack vectors than a MIPS machine running exactly the same software, since the former is subject to buffer overflow and code injection attacks that the later is not (that's not to say you couldn't make such attacks on MIPS, merely that available toolkits and software all aim at attacking x86 machines due to their popularity).

Of course, a well-configured x86 box will be a perfectly reliable firewall for all practical purposes. And being familiar with the system you are working on (for a complex system, anyway) is as important as any inherent security benefits.

But what *does* make a big difference is keeping your firewall box simple in regard to software - you don't run unnecessary services, and you use the simplest possible alternatives for the services you need (assuming they are good enough, of course). Thus you don't run apache on your firewall - making you therefore immune to any security flaws in apache, and you don't want to use X for configuring your firewall. You don't even want that sort of thing installed in the first place.

If you want to make a single consolidated server and firewall server, the best way is to have the server stuff running as virtual machines so that you have *almost* as good security as if they were physically separated.

To some extent, they all do, but the V5 and later models have half the RAM and half the flash memory of earlier models. The V5 thru V8 models come from the factory running VxWorks. The others already run Linux, which is how the alternate firmware sources got started. Due the GPL, Linksys had to make their kernel sources available. Only the driver for the Broadcom wireless chip could be distributed in binary-only form. That driver file has been an important resource in the reverse engineering of the BCM43xx chips, which has led to the bcm43xx opn-source driver for Linux.

If your WRT54G doesn't have a version listed on the name plate, then it is likely a V1, which will run 3rd party Linux firmware.

Larry

Even V5 and above can be flashed with a 3rd party Linux firmware. As I stated in a previous post to this very thread,

provides information on flashing v5 and above WRT54G routers. I successfully flashed my v5. It involves more than flashing 1 file but it's hardly difficult.

Mine is V2 and is flashable. Could anyone explain in a couple of sentences just what is involved in flashing one. Thanks

i

They're all flashable. It's basically the same process you'd go through to upgrade to a new Linksys firmware version. With WRT54G v5 and above, the process is a little more involved as you have to flash a couple of extra files first.