New hardware for the homelab. Honestly OpenWRT has been (luckily) set and forget for me. It has been reliable since installation and hasn’t had any problems. Granted I haven’t been using this OS to its max (I honestly use it as a switch). I wanted to write this post up more, but truthfully it got away from me and now I have forgotten the headers. If you find this helpful, great, if not, just continue on.
New Router
Well…. New switch, same router. At least the way I have it configured.
I didn’t end up replacing the router I have with this openwrt router, but rather added this appliance as a switch in my room for wired and direct connection to my homelab (of course over coax).
TFTP and the Firewall
Disable the firewall on the default hardware and enable tftp, this will allow you to add wrt firmware to the switch.
A7, not C7
It turns out A is different than C and trying to push C7 firmware to an A7 switch isn’t liked. Luckily nothing foobarred me too badly and I was able to just pull down the A7 firmware from OpenWRT’s site and install the A7 firmware on my compatible hardware.
Trunk Ports and Access Ports on the Switch
Well.. It turns out vlan is important. I have my wifi network tagged on a different network to separate traffic from my “datacenter.”
53Net
My own private “wifi.” I set this up with a hidden SSID and a wpa2 security password.