Disruptive Weekend

I spent the weekend setting up my diabolical scheme to set up a network for my neighborhood. The HomePlug tests worked fine, as I reported earlier, though it didn’t reach the corner of the neighborhood I needed initially.

That left 802.11g to cover the gaps. I had a new, in-the-box Linksys WRT54G which I bought for the purpose of hacking. It was perched on the top bookshelf near a window on the front of our house. I installed a separate network card in my firewall and assigned a fresh DHCP range to any hosts appearing on that network. To keep the spammers out, I blocked outgoing port 25.

I didn’t get any hits on the access point all weekend, so I spent some time last night gleefully voiding the warranty on the Linksys. That’s right: months after Shane gave his talk on putting Linux on the Linksys, I finally got around to doing it, loading it up OpenWRT. To my surprise, the process was dirt-simple. OpenWRT’s default configuration provides you with a simple NAT firewall and dns redirection, so you can flash it and immediately resume using your access point as an access point. Even without the built-in access point hardware, running Linux on the box is useful in itself. It’s fast and very expandable. I can think of many cool things to do with it.

I hope to add a capture page when people first log into the access point, but for now its up and running. The first step to world domination!