OpenWRT Homebrewed Router Update

I have to say, the PC-based router has been a tremendous upgrade to my network. I set it up back in November of last year, and it’s been running strong ever since, absolutely rock-solid. I didn’t really know what I was missing when I used an off-the-self ARM-based router, even loaded up with OpenWRT. The performance increase is pretty insane.

I just did a firmware upgrade on it, and I’m on the other side of that now; actually, it wasn’t too bad, but the main thing to keep in mind is that none of the add-on software survives the upgrade, only the OpenWRT core and the core settings. My firewall rules survived, as did my LAN and WAN configuration. WIFI configuration, though, did not survive, because the wireless drivers, in my case the kmod-ath9k drivers, are add-ons.

I have to back up. I forgot to mention that the filesystem has to be expanded again to take advantage of the full capacity of the system disk. That needs to be done first, probably. Just follow the guide on the OpenWRT site.

I did the upgrade through LUCI over wifi, so I lost connection and had to connect to it with a hard line and a laptop to get it back going again, and that was just a matter of using opkg to install the drivers and a reboot. That along with wpad-openssl, which provides wireless security such as WPA2 and WPA3.

Start to finish, I was done in less than an hour.