[sf-lug] 2018-04-16 SF-LUG meeting notes + my additions

Wed Apr 18 16:15:35 PDT 2018

Quoting Bobbie  Sellers <bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com>:

> A few minutes later Aaron C. came in and had several
> items including a modem Siemens SpeedStream 4100 ADSL+
> which he has kindly loaned me. Later he bought the
> mini Dell tower from John S.

On that "mini Dell tower from John S" ...

Yep, upgraded the RAM on the Optiplex 780 RAM I purchased from John S to 
8GB. 64bit Slackware and 64bit Mint perform quite well with the BIOS flash 
I performed on this unit. It stands to reason that Optiplex 780 as 
currently configured performs _much_ better than the Optiplex 745 I 
previously purchased from John S several years ago. Can now use the latest 
systemd-free Devuan in a Mint-hosted virtualbox just like I did ~2yrs ago 
(see ref [01]).

Would also mention that at Monday night's mtg, Bobbie S graciously 
provided me a bootable optical disk of ArchLabs Linux, which is 64bit 
_only_ (see ref [02]). Note that while there are still 32bit community 
variants of Arch Linux still in active development (see ref [03]), the 
vast majority or maybe even all of these 32bit Arch versions are 
systemd-based -- this somewhat goes back to a discussion of systemd-free 
versions of Arch from awhile back (see ref [04]).

Quoting Bobbie  Sellers <bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com>:

> Jim S. came in about 6:30 PM,  far earlier than we had hoped.
>
> A discussion ensued of which routers could use Open-Wrt or
> DD-Wrt software or other efforts to replace the firmware of
> the routers with a more secure version of Linux.
> How such replacement could be accomplished was a matter
> of some discussion as well.  These efforts are based on
> Linksys WRT54G model router which used Open Source
> software thus making it accessible to developers originally
> but they are trying to get more routers supported.
> The hardware requirement of more than 32 megabytes of
> ram is eliminating a lot of older cheaper devices.
> Read more about the effort at <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DD-WRT>.

Just a reminder very much related to this that Daniel G and Rick M had a 
recent discussion of OpenWrt router firmware (see ref [05], [06], and the 
end of [07]).  At the beginning of this year, the OpenWrt project made the 
announcement that OpenWrt is merging with LEDE (see ref [08]). Directly 
related to Bobbie S's warning of "32 megabytes of ram is eliminating a lot 
of older cheaper devices" plus Daniel G's and Rick M's posts on routers' 
16MB RAM and use of 2.4 kernels (see refs [09] thru [13]), the new 
OpenWrt/LEDE firmware are now supporting much fewer devices.
Of special note are OpenWrt/LEDE's "4/32" warnings (see refs [14] and 
[15]) for devices with 4MB or less flash and 32MB or less RAM.

While there are many routers -- 1068 at last count -- still supported by 
fairly-recent versions of pre-LEDE OpenWrt and OpenWrt/LEDE itself (see 
ref [16]), even more routers are _still_ supported by DD-DRT (see ref 
[17]). Even considering Daniel G's and Rick M's security warnings about 
2.4 and 2.6 kernels in refs [09] thru [13], sometimes the few firmware 
options available for routers of <4MB flash and having 16MB RAM are DD-WRT 
firmware with these unsatisfactory limitations.

At Monday night's meeting, I brought in the working Linksys(Cisco) 
E1000v2.1 WiFi router I mentioned I would try to bring in my last post 
(see refs [18] and [19]). John S brought in his working Linksys WRT54Gv2.0 
and Linksys WRT54GLv1.1 (see respective refs [20] and [21]).

(((
Sidenote question....
Can anyone guess WITHOUT looking what the identity of the manufacturer 
is/was for the chips on all three of these above routers??

Giveaway hint: Heaps of condemnation were put on this particular chip 
manufacturer and its policies within refs [22],[23], the end of ref [24], 
and refs [25],[26], [27] previously submitted by Todd H, maestro, Rick M, 
and Akkana P.
)))

In any case, all three of the low-end WiFi routers John S and I brought in 
Monday night are supported by DD-WRT (see ref [17] to verify). The 
E1000v2.1 is supported by the current OpenWrt/LEDE v17.01.x (see ref [16] 
to verify), however both Linksys WRT54Gx routers John S brought in are 
_only_ supported by the older OpenWrt 10.0.x version, specifically because 
of the reasons Daniel G already mentioned within ref [09].

All mentioned above (i.e., Daniel G, Rick M, Bobbie S, John S, Todd H, 
maestro, and Akkana P.) are very much welcome and invited to step-in and 
provide your corrections/clarifications, your illuminating comments, and 
your excellent advice on the above. Of course Michael P and others are 
welcome to chip-in as well :-)

Quoting Bobbie  Sellers <bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com>:

> Anyone attending the meeting is free to correct
> my omissions or incomprehension of the
> activities and asked to do so asap so that the
> membership not in attendance will not be
> mis-informed any longer than necessary.

Besides the longer above narrative, the only other additions I've got 
right now are that I demo'd the DD-WRT-build desktop's GUI management 
console on the E1000v2.1 and explained to jim the various ways using 
software and hardware to flash the firmware on WiFi routers.

Best
-A

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References:
===================

[01]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2016q1/011720.html 
[02]https://archlabslinux.com/ 
[03]https://archlinux32.org/ 
[04]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2017q4/012897.html 
[05]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2018q2/013135.html 
[06]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2018q2/013139.html 
[07]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2018q2/013145.html 
[08]https://openwrt.org/ 
[09]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2018q2/013146.html 
[10]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2018q2/013147.html 
[11]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2018q2/013148.html 
[12]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2018q2/013152.html 
[13]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2018q2/013153.html 
[14]https://openwrt.org/supported_devices 
[15]https://openwrt.org/supported_devices/432_warning 
[16]https://openwrt.org/toh/start 
[17]https://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_Devices 
[18]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2018q2/013133.html 
[19]https://wikidevi.com/wiki/Linksys_E1000_v2.1 
[20]https://wikidevi.com/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_v2.0 
[21]https://wikidevi.com/wiki/Linksys_WRT54GL_v1.1 
[22]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2017q4/012942.html 
[23]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2017q4/012943.html 
[24]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2017q4/012948.html 
[25]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2017q4/012950.html 
[26]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2017q4/012951.html 
[27]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2017q4/012952.html

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aaronco36 at sdf.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.org