01 Oct 08 APNIC Box - Linux on a Mikrotik 532a, Part 1 - The Device

I put this device together for fun sometime around the start of 2007. The ideas that spawned this was using OpenWRT on a Linksys WRT54G access point. A surprisingly powerful and full linux distro with all kinds of advanced capabilities running on a Linksys wireless router which I’d previously thought to be a reasonably dumb device with computing power more comparable to a calculator than a PC. The project opened my eyes to embedded devices, and I wondered what device base I should start with. To cut a long story short and for reasons that I can’t even remember anymore I came across the Mikrotik Routerboard 532A and decided that I should start with that.

Conception

Here’s a picture of the device from the outside with some labels, view the full image to see them.

1. Status LEDs. Blue at the bottom left shows it’s on, orange at the top right shows that there’s wifi activity.
2. Ethernet (eth0)
3. Standard Serial Console (57600, 8 N 1)
4. Ethernet (eth1)
5. Ethernet (eth2)

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Tags: adsl2+, APNIC, APNIC Box, distro, ethernet, isp, linksys router, Linux, Linux routing, modem, openwrt, picolcd, public IP, redundancy, routerboard 532a, serial console, switch

26 May 08 Custom linux router, routing, split access and more..

So, now I have got this router set up and working, it was time to customize it somewhat.

In terms of networking, we have 3 10/100 ethernet ports and one wireless adapter, and this is set up as follows:

Internet comes in to eth1 and eth2, both of which have public IPs. eth0 which is another ethernet interface is bridged with ath0 which is my wireless interface (in master mode, with WPA-PSK/TKIP with hostap running) to form br-lan, whos IP is 192.168.100.1and is connected via a switch to feed the LAN PCs

I’m using a pretty simple netfilter masquerade script in use with this for NAT.
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Tags: bridge, ethernet, hostap, IP, load balance, multiple providers, router, split access, upnp, wireless, wpa