Contest For a Better Open-WRT Wireless Router GUI 217
Reader RoundSparrow sends word of a contest, with big cash prizes, being mounted by a commercial vender of open source Open-WRT routers. You have 10 months to come up with "the most impressive User Interface/Firmware for Ubiquiti's newly released open-source embedded wireless platform, the RouterStation." Entries are required to have open source licensing and will all be released. First prize is $160,000, with four runners-up receiving $10,000. RoundSparrow adds: "Could be built on top of existing X-WRT or LuCI OpenWRT web interfaces. OpenWRT Kamikaze 8.09 was just released. Now is perfect timing for OpenWRT to get some kick-ass interface and usability ideas. I'm not affiliated with the contest vendor."
Modern Linux hackable routers, 802.11n support (Score:5, Informative)
Other OpenWRT news. The newest Atheros 9xxx radio chips is available in a number of OpenWRT supported routers now. I have been working to help organize new 802.11n support in OpenWRT. I have compiled a list of consumer routers that work with Linux ath9k driver and ar71xx CPU. In order of current recommendation:
Planex (PCI) MZK-W04NU, 32MB RAM and 8MB flash, USB port, 10/100 Ethernet
Trendnet TEW-652BRP, 32MB RAM and 4MB flash, 10/100 Ethernet
Trendnet TEW-632BRP, 32MB RAM and 4MB flash, 10/100 Ethernet
D-Link DIR-615 revision C1 (ONLY!), 32MB of RAM and 4MB flash, 10/100 Ethernet
TP-Link TL-WR941N WR941ND, 32MB RAM and 4MB flash, 10/100 Ethernet
OpenWRT team is pretty close also on the Netgear WNR2000.
These listed above all come from a common Atheros AP81 reference platform. see http://wiki.openwrt.org/AtherosAR9100 [openwrt.org]
In USA and Japan, the Planex is available on Amazon.com for $59.99 with free shipping... it has more flash and USB port. 3 removable antennas, is a nice hacker system. In the USA, the Trendnet routers have been on sale from Newegg, Fry's, buy.com for only $25 a few times. I will try to post on Reddit / my Slashdot journal when I see them on sale for $25 next time.
The ath9k driver for Linux is not yet mature but is moving along... in 2 to 3 months I expect we have a very nice platform... and the router interface and ease of use of OpenWRT is getting attention with this contest! Now is an exciting time for OpenWRT and Linux routers - finally moving to some new N devices.
Re:X-WRT? (Score:4, Informative)
Noting wrong with X-WRT, I use it. The OpenWRT developers recently choose LuCI as default for Kamikaze 8.09 release.
I also forgot to mention there are other up to date alternate such as Gargoyle http://www.gargoyle-router.com/ [gargoyle-router.com] that is GPL license and could be uses as basis for contest entry.
You can view this as fit and finish challenge - but will you win the contest if you put the least effort in?
Re:X-WRT? (Score:2, Informative)
How terrible for you that someone spends money on what matters to them instead of what matters to you. These guys deserve better than your blinkered dismissal.
The sponsors and the OpenWRT team in general are people who care about use of low-footprint routers in much more complex circumstances than the average Joe's SOHO router. They deploy huge meshes of routers and manage them as a service, sometimes as cooperatives and sometimes as full-blown commercial endeavors.
It is great to see these self-funding OSS communities prove that there are ways to make a living without adopting draconian licensing schemes and FUD.
It's not that easy (Score:3, Informative)
It looks like the overall discussion quickly drifted away from the actual topic and the further degrades into insults and endless discussions about cli vs. gui / enduser vs. professional etc. But hey, this is slashdot so I think it's expected.
Anyway, I think that most people miss the point here. The challange is about to implement a (new) gui for the Ubiquity Router Station, based on AirOS which is actually a snapshot of the OpenWrt Kamikaze trunk with some patches added for board support and another proprietary hal to drive the Atheros cards used with the board.
The RouterStation [ubnt.com] is not exactly a SOHO device, it's a bare embedded board featuring a fast MIPS cpu and three MiniPCI slots, POE and some other fuzz.
It has higher specs then the average Broadcom gear and is intended for larger infrastructure deployments, like wisps etc.
So far on the target hardware. Since one requirement is to use OpenWrt/AirOS as base operating system, one can rule out Tomato (which ppl quickly suggested) since it's built on top of the former disclosed Linksys SDK for WRT54G devices and relies heavily on a Linux 2.4 kernel to use bcm43xx wireless phy. Part of the original Linksys firmware design was the use of nvram as central configuration storage which is abandonned in nowadays Kamikaze releases. Anyway - I think it's nearly possible to rip the gui off an existing firmware project and refactor it to run on top of OpenWrt, it would be easier to just start from scratch.
Now the list of required features [ubnt.com] is pretty long and includes stuff that's not present in (half) open source firmwares like Tomato, DD-Wrt or OpenWrt. It includes things like bgp/ospf routing, bonding, snmp or layer 2 firewalling (ebtables, arp nat ...) just to name a few. That are things a normal ui designer can't draft without the support of one or more networking experts who actually know whats this about and how it's done properly. Some of that features also are inherently complex and can't be fully abstracted away with some fancy ui elements and a short help text on each page. On the other hand an ui allows to present complex relations like traffic flow, qos behaviour, wifi signal stength etc. in a visual way that can't be accomplished with a cli-only interface.
The to-be-developed ui is not intended for casual users that just want to hook up a bunch of computers and get into the internet. It's also not intended to be used by people who don't have a clue about networking or don't want to learn about the principles of the involved technologies. You have to keep in mind that the interface should be able to handle multiple wifi cards with multiple wireless networks each, that it should ease the setup of complex network configurations without limiting the amount of possible options. It's also not about a fancy web 2.0 portal or shiny flash interfaces, just to please possible customers.
Imho the ui should also be designed in such a way that it allows a smooth coexistance with cli-based workflows. Neither Tomato nor DD-Wrt provide such abilities since the underlying system is optimized to be used by the ui and hardly intuitive to use via the cli. Think of it like the relation of Linux and Xorg. You can uninstall all X related stuff and still have a functional system where you can access all resources etc.
Another fact to worry about is the portability of such an ui - if one wants to make it into a generic interface for OpenWrt, it would have to support a wide range of hardware from simple Linksys boxes to X86 gear like Avila or Alix boards, tt would have to support wireless configuration for madwifi, legacy broadcom and mac80211 based wireless drivers, each with different ways of configuration. Oh - and it should support kernel 2.4 and 2.6 which becomes a real pain if one relies on sysfs for state information.
Also the choice of the programming language and framework matters, one could go ahea
Re:needs an easy way to edit firewall rules (Score:1, Informative)
Sorry, your moron won't understand that. How about this:
Well, WTF is your moron user going to do then? They're too stupid to know what an ARP relay attack is and "hacking your shit" doesn't tell you anything except go crying to your nerd friends. You're not thinking this through and you're exactly the kind of person we all hate. Sorry, no, it can't get much simpler, you're just an asshole who doesn't want to learn how it all works or pay someone who has learned. I'm sure that instead of thinking about this, though, you're just going to go on posting broken HTML and the complaining about how /. uses Extrans or some other bullshit without reading the help pages. My blockquotes work fine with Chrome. You suck, dude, I bet the IT department at your company hates your guts.
Re:I have a suggestion ... (Score:1, Informative)
Or if content you need/want is only available via IPv6.
Usability? (Score:2, Informative)
I use a wireless router as a repeater, and upon searching for which firmware version I would like to use, I found that:
DD-WRT you click repeater, set the SSID of the source network, the SSID of the new repeater network, and assign it a WPA password. Done. Happy point and click. (source: I did it.)
OpenWRT I found that you have to edit the
The OpenWRT was doable, but would certainly take more than the 30 seconds I needed to setup, then forget, the DD-WRT firmware that I went with. I think this story is an advertisement because they are losing a popularity contest with DD-WRT. And yes, you can telnet into the DD-WRT and edit the files manually as well if that's your thing.