Tuesday, May 01, 2012

TP-Link MR-3220 + OpenWRT, lessons learned

Recently I've tried to install modified firmware on my TP-Link MR-3220. It's a decent wifi router, in my opinion. It has a USB port so it can be connected with wireless modems. But I found some difficulties from it. Some modems I owned cannot be detected, while some other can be used, but really hard to connect with the non-bundled network provider. (The wifi router is positioned on the second floor of 3 stories building, so the wireless broadband signal is not good enough).

And then I found OpenWRT. The aim of OpenWRT is basically to replace the stock firmware of wireless router to an open-source, linux based operating system. It even got it's own package manager (OPKG). With it, my broadband modem finally works with the MR-3220 and non-bundled internet provider.


I'm not going to explain how to install and configure it, (the installation is pretty straightforward. Just use the original firmware update page from the web admin). But from my effort to install it, I learnt some important points :

  • Since it is UNIX based, it is better if you got some experience with UNIX/Linux before using it
  • The firewall policy is pretty complete. You have to remember to add the network interface you created to at least one of the firewall zone.
  • The original binary from the trunk, is NOT including web based management interface (LuCI). If you want to have web based management interface (which I think really helps a lot), make sure to use the correct binary, otherwise you will need to go through the process of manually installing the "luci" package
  • DO NOT try to update the packages. If you want a newer package, install the whole firmware again.
If you need more resource and information, visit these useful links:
http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/ (not embedded with web admin / LuCI)
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