Bringing OpenWrt to the Mikrotik hAP lite (RB941-2nD-TC)

In a previous post I described the Mikrotik hAP lite (RB941-2nD-TC) and its RouterOS and already suggested that I prefer to run OpenWrt on it. Because Mikrotik routers behave a bit different than the usual TP-Link, GL.iNet etc. devices and because there were some pitfalls I had to master myself, here’s some advice to keep… Continue reading Bringing OpenWrt to the Mikrotik hAP lite (RB941-2nD-TC)

Choosing a cheap but maintained/maintainable LAN router

Recently I’ve been tasked with the problem of finding a router that had to fulfill five key requirements: it had to offer in total four to five LAN ports, have an internal or a detachable Wifi antenna (if at all), offer a maintained/maintainable firmware, be compact and, most of all, better be cheap, for a… Continue reading Choosing a cheap but maintained/maintainable LAN router

Maintaining home network access from the outside with a network-controllable power plug, OpenWrt/LEDE and a 4G LTE stick

Internet routers are supposed to operate in a stable fashion. Except they don’t (FritzBox *cough*) – especially when you’re away from home and need access to your home resources. Having to call someone related to go and reset the thing tends to get awkward. If you encounter this often enough, you begin looking for a… Continue reading Maintaining home network access from the outside with a network-controllable power plug, OpenWrt/LEDE and a 4G LTE stick

OpenWrt Remote debugging

While analyzing hostapd and trying to find out where to hook in after WPA pairwise key exchange has completed, the need arose to get a gdb running on the target platform (the EPIA MII), so I could break in the function and obtain a backtrace.

What’s the EPIA MII supposed to do?

Due to its connectivity options (Ethernet onboard, WLAN addable via PCI card, CardBus slot or USB for UMTS adapter, possibly even a CompactFlash adapter) the EPIA MII suggests itself, of course, as a router device and that’s what it was originally intended for. However, now in the first place it’ll have a slightly different assignment.

My EPIA MII-based system

I recently mentioned my EPIA MII-based system. The EPIA MII is a highly integrated mainboard from Via’s Embedded division that comes in the itsy-tiny Mini-ITX form factor. I originally bought it way back together with a Casetronic Travla C158 case to be the base for an OpenWrt-based UMTS router. However I never got around it… Continue reading My EPIA MII-based system

Hacking the Netgear WG102 Access Point

This article describes my experiences while conducting some reverse engineering of the Netgear WG102 firmware. For one thing, you might learn something about the approaches and methods useful when you want to find out “how they did that” (they = the device’s manufacturer) in general, on the other hand there is also a lot of WG102 resp. Netgear-specific information in here, of course.