I finally finished setting up the replacement for my WRT54GS (OpenWrt Whiterussian RC3) router, which is mostly used for routing wireless traffic and providing switch ports for my HTPC.  The replacement hardware is an ASUS WL-500g Premium router running OpenWrt 7.09.

The specifications aren't too shabby.  The main feature is 2x USB 2.0 ports on the back of the unit, powered by a VIA 6212 EHCI controller.  I'm thinking I'll either use them for Bluetooth or a webcam.

OpenWrt 7.09 (Kamikaze series) is a decent release, except for some fairly annoying issues:

→ There aren't any Quagga packages built for 7.09.  I had to manually install the ipks from the 7.06 release, and they seem to work.  I haven't found any reason why Quagga was omitted from the list of packages, yet.

→ BusyBox sucks.  It's a very, very, very poor substitute for coreutils, fileutils, et al.  It also has a ton of bugs.  For example, the ifconfig syntax (odd and nonstandard) is the following:

BusyBox v1.4.2 (2007-09-29 09:01:24 CEST) multi-call binary

Usage: ifconfig [-a] <interface> [<address>]

Configure a network interface

Options:
        [add <address>[/<prefixlen>]]
        [del <address>[/<prefixlen>]]
        [[-]broadcast [<address>]] [[-]pointopoint [<address>]]
        [netmask <address>] [dstaddr <address>]
        [hw ether <address>] [metric <NN>] [mtu <NN>]
        [[-]trailers] [[-]arp] [[-]allmulti]
        [multicast] [[-]promisc] [txqueuelen <NN>] [[-]dynamic]
        [up|down] ...

So, I tried to do this:

[root:kamikaze]# ifconfig lo:0 1.2.3.4/32 
[root:kamikaze]# ifconfig lo:0
lo:0      Link encap:Local Loopback   
          inet addr:1.2.3.4  Mask:255.0.0.0
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1

Look at the mask.  It defaulted to classful addressing, where the network 1.0.0.0 is defined as a class A network with a 255.0.0.0 (8-bit) subnet mask.  Replacing /32 with netmask resolves it, but jeez folks, why can't we just stick with the normal syntax?

→ The network scripts are not IPv6-aware, and have trouble assigning interface aliases during bootup.

Anyway, at least it doesn't lock up like the WRT54GS :P

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