2 Bit Hacker

During Thursday’s ice storm I decided to power down my FreeBSD box at home, which acts as my router and file server. Unfortunately, it didn’t want to boot back up afterwards, and since it didn’t have a monitor on it, I couldn’t really debug it. This prodded me into finally moving my cable modem/router set up from the corner of the home office to the front closet. This led to the problem of how to get connectivity to the stuff in the entertainment center.

In the past I had used a Linksys WRT54g running dd-wrt, configured to be a wireless client and acting as a bridge, but for streaming video and gaming I don’t really like using wireless. I had replaced the wireless bridge with a long piece of cable running around the living room and into the office, but that would have been really ugly to run into the closet. So, over the weekend I decided to pick up a Linksys PLK300, a pair of Powerline AV adapters, one with a built-in 4 port switch. Brought them home, plugged them in, and it just worked. I’m somewhat impressed, I was expecting some sort of issue, since I have one of them plugged into the surge protection side of a UPS.

So now in the front closet I have the cable coming into the apartment to a 2-way splitter (previously a 2-way then a 4-way, which may have been causing some of my signal issues) then into my cable modem, which connects to one side of my FreeBSD router/file server, which then connects to a WRT54g running dd-wrt, which provides wireless connectivity, then the single port powerline adapter plugs into that. Then in the entertainment center, it’s just the XBox 360 and TiVo connected to the powerline adapter with the 4-port switch.

Overall I freed up a 5-port switch, an 8-port switch, a bunch of Cat5, and some space in the office.

Next, I think I’m going to reconfigure the WRT to do some VLANs, trunking them into my FreeBSD box, and put my Fonera and DynWiFi Meraki on their own VLAN.

Geek Stuff dd-wrt, freebsd, linksys, plk300, wrt54g

For some reason my Linksys WRT54G running the Sveasoft firmware died this morning. Originally I thought Comcast had gotten mad and killed my service, but when I checked on the router its little Power LED was blinking away, indicating that it had lost its poor little mind. Luckily we had Delia’s Netgear router from her old apartment on hand, and got back up and running pretty quickly, but I’m annoyed at the Linksys now. I think I’m either going to flash it back to the default Linksys firmware, or try for the OpenWRT stuff. Though I’m planning to stop using it as a router anyway, just using it as an AP.

Which brings me to my plans for the weekend. I’m taking Mage, my server from the office, home with me, going to trade it’s EPIA mainboard for one of the other boards around the apartment and build the EPIA into a home router. I plan to throw OpenBSD on it, which should allow for all sorts of fun. Hopefully I can setup some better packet queue management stuff to keep the VoIP line sounds good even when someone is downloading something. Should be a simple matter.

Geek Stuff linksys, openbsd, router, wrt54g