Hardware

As the number of users increases, it is time to introduce speed limits in the network.

While I do not need this on my home router, in corporate use, it is worth knowing who and how much is using the connection and, if necessary, introducing appropriate restrictions.

First, you need to find out who, and then how much.

Recently while playing Call of Duty Mobile, I would occasionally experience a sudden slowdown in the form of increased ping, which would make the game temporarily unplayable.

Recently I decided to add a USB connected printer to my OpenWrt router.

While I normally use a wireless solution with built-in AirPrint (so I can print directly from my iPhone/iPad), sharing a USB printer on a network involves purchasing a print server.

Unfortunately, currently available print servers lack support for, for example, AirPrint, i.e. the ability to print wirelessly from Apple devices such as iPhone or iPad.

If I find one that has AirPrint, it is either very expensive or the manufacturer has discontinued its further development, which is a pity.

So I decided to use my OpenWrt router. Since it has two USB ports, one of which, USB 2.0, which I happen to have free, is perfect for connecting a printer.

In fact, I cared most about AirPrint, and you can read about what came out of it below.

Cloudflare is known for being the next Google and providing us with high-quality services, many of which can be used for free without any compromises. Fortunately, unlike Google, it is not so eager to kill its services.

From domain management, to SSL certificate for your website, secure and fast DNS, to turbocharging your internet connection with WARP (or WARP+ for those who want more).

The UK’s service providers are very much behind the times when it comes to the latest technological developments. Given the somewhat phlegmatic attitude of the British people towards new technologies, it’s no wonder that ISPs are still stuck in the Stone Age (IPv4), even though the stones (the pool of IPv4 addresses) are gone. While I am lucky to have an external IPv4 address, I can forget about a version 6 address (thumbs down for Virgin Media).

Luckily, there is a solution, and it’s free!

So you want to add a torrent client to your OpenWrt router, so that you can download, for example, a Raspbian image using this method, save it to a previously connected and configured USB drive and access it from the local network?

Continuing my post Adding a USB drive to a router with OpenWrt using the USB port (using the Linksys WRT3200ACM as an example), we move on to sharing our drive on the local network.

Today’s solution is a bit unusual - my network drive (NAS) recently stopped working, and to sort it out I need to do some digging in it. In the meantime, I would like to use the USB 3.0 port built into my WRT3200ACM router with OpenWrt software to share a USB drive on the network.

Whether you have reinstalled OpenWrt or updated it, even though you have backed up your settings, any additionally installed packages have not (will not) been preserved, so restoring the settings will not make everything as it was. For now, this is normal behavior with OpenWrt. Therefore, you need to think about how to approach this so that the update and restore of settings will proceed as expected, i.e. together with the packages.

Today I am going to discuss a topic that causes problems for people who have an Internet connection without a permanent external IP address if we want to run a VPN server on our connection, as I described in the post Installing a VPN server on a router with OpenWrt (WireGuard).