EricBall's Tech Projects

Hatta · June 11, 2012

I'd try OpenWRT. You should be able to compile a version that will do guest wifi. dd-wrt is practically dead from what I hear.

EricBall · June 11, 2012

Yeah, I'm fairly certain that OpenWRT can do what I want, but there's a substantial learning curve which I'd rather not climb. It's not the command line stuff which I object to but the lack of "if you want/have this, you need (to do) this".

For example, the documentation on Guest WLAN (which is what I want) says:

"Note: Your hardware may not be capable of this. For example, open source b43 driver for Broadcome hardware cannot have multiple SSIDs. You need to use the proprietary wl driver by Broadcom (with 2.6 kernel) - currently, you need to build the images yourself. — sup 2012/05/12 20:22"

Okay, but that doesn't mean anything to me. How can I determine whether OpenWRT for my Linksys uses b43? The link the building images goes to the Image Generator, which appears to be Linux based and, again, makes some big assumptions on what knowledge I possess. It's the difference between a true/false/multiple choice test and an essay question. I can usually Google the answers to the former but get quickly exhausted by the latter.

OTOH, I'm seriously considering installing Tomato. It may not have the guest wifi feature (although it's been grafted into some modified versions), but it should include fixes for any common problems in the stock firmware.

EricBall · June 12, 2012

I gave one last try to figure out OpenWRT before giving up and installing Tomato. OpenWRT is almost certainly the more active firmware (since Tomato hasn't been updated in 2 years), but it suffers from "geek documentation". Maybe if I were willing to spend more time learning the lingo and the technology I'd be able to get to my desired destination, but I'd rather spend my limited free time doing other stuff.

Tomato, OTOH, was reasonably easy to download (yes, I downloaded more than I needed, but the readmes made it clear which one I needed), install and configure. I'm also fairly comfortable sticking with the defaults.