Marcin Juszkiewicz - network

Upgraded to OpenWRT 25.12

2026-03-24T08:18:00+01:00

I upgraded my router to OpenWRT 25.12. Nothing strange right?

And then I realized that I use OpenWRT for over twenty years…

All started with Linksys WRT54GS

Long, long time, when I worked from an office, I got Linksys WRT54GS as a donation. IIRC I got money to buy it as this was simpler than sending device from abroad.

Having Wi-Fi at home allowed me to test more stuff on Sharp Zaurus devices. Or install/upgrade packages in an easy way.

It was running OpenWRT WhiteRussian for quite a while as device upgrades were quite problematic at that time.

Other devices

During next years I used a mix of devices running OpenWRT. Routers, access points or devices which served both those functions at the same time.

Netgear WNDR4300 N750 brought 5GHz Wi-Fi network to my flat. Running MiniPC + Belkin BT3200 (aka Linksys E8450) combo brought network separation as I started using VLANs. Etc. etc.

Why OpenWRT?

Having a unified way of doing network setup was a key for me when I was choosing next router/AP device. Or ability to install additional packages which brings more functions. Especially since 512 MB RAM became popular in a router.

Why it matters to me? I am not a network admin. Never planned to be. So being able to switch to a new device and restore configuration from a previous one saves my time.

There are no limitations on how I name my Wi-Fi networks (national characters, emojis, spaces), how many of them will be, what kind of firewall zones I want and which devices/networks are in which zone. Etc…

OPNsense is not for my router :(

2023-12-21T21:21:00+01:00

For over two years my router is small x86-64 box running OpenWRT. But I have some issues with it.

Hardware info

I bought this PC on Aliexpress somewhere in 2021. It has Intel Celeron J3160 cpu, 2GB of ram and 4 Intel i211 network cards.

My x86-64 router

Can be upgraded to 8GB of ram. Can use mSata SSD, has space for 2.5” SATA drive, video outputs, usb ports…

And contrary to several Arm systems it can boot several operating systems out of the box.

Let’s try OPNsense!

OPNsense is FreeBSD based system for network routers. With web interface, packages, monitoring, firewalling etc. Just like OpenWRT but not based on Linux.

Fetched current version (23.7), wrote to usb thumbdrive and booted. It recognized all hardware etc. Took me a bit of time to get basic network running (PPPoE on igb0, LAN on igb1-3).

And then checked performance. Network was 300/300 Mbps on speedtest.net service. The problem is I have 1000/300 Mbps connection.

FreeBSD bug

There is a bug reported in FreeBSD for it:

[igb] PPPoE RX traffic is limited to one queue

On PPPoE interface packets are only received on one NIC driver queue (queue0). This is hurting system performance.

I read through it, took system tunables from comment #11 and rebooted. New values were used:

root@krzys:~ # sysctl -a | grep net.isr
net.isr.numthreads: 4
net.isr.maxprot: 16
net.isr.defaultqlimit: 256
net.isr.maxqlimit: 10240
net.isr.bindthreads: 1
net.isr.maxthreads: 4
net.isr.dispatch: deferred

Speedtest.net shown improvements. But still slow — only 470/300 Mbps.

Time to go back to OpenWRT?

Looks like I will go back to OpenWRT. It is not a perfect solution but works for me on this hardware.

I may not be a fan of how it upgrades packages and rootfs but I have some scripts to make it easier and in saner way.

One day will reconsider running Debian or Fedora on it. I had Debian based router in past and it was working fine.

Dropped AAAA record from DNS

2015-11-25T15:11:00+01:00

I host my blog on small machine somewhere in OVH. As part of package I got IPv6 address for it. Five minutes ago I decided to no longer use it.

My home Internet provider (UPC) does not offer IPv6 addresses so testing is my blog (or other pages/services I host) reachable via IPv6 was always problematic. Ok, I have sixxs.net tunnel setup on one of routers at home but it is not fun when your browser (and other tools) decide to use IPv6 instead of IPv4 and slow down from 250/20 Mbps to tunnel speed.

So when today I got information that something is not reachable via IPv6 I decided to just drop use of it on server. Will fix configs but do not want to get information that something else break on the other day.

Today is GPRS day

2010-08-12T11:32:00+02:00

I wake up quarter past 6 in the morning. Some time later went to my desktop to check does something happened during night. Usually it means IRC highlights or new emails but today it was something other: network outage.

OK, I told — there are other things to do like buying train tickets, making few calls, breakfast etc. But I returned home 2 hours later and situation did not changed. Cable modem still blinks with “DS” led… After call to isp (UPC) I got information that there are some modernization works in progress and will be ended at the end of hour. But hour later it was still “at the end of current hour”…

As I had to be at work I took my Nokia N900 from pocket and launched X-Chat to give network outage information to my coworkers. And started to think how to fix situation…

Lack of sleeping seats in train forced me to change train so I will take my laptop with me to be in contact during trip. So I had to learn how to use N900 as modem anyway.

So how to do it? Thanks to blog post by Marius Gedminas I had easy way. As I prefer to not have cables hanging and like to have more battery power I had to limit myself to BlueTooth.

Nokia N900 side: installed “bluetooth-dun” package which starts “dund” so “Dial-Up Networking” appears in list of offered services.

Desktop side: BlueDevil detected phone but handles only OBEX and Audio profile ;( Thanks to one of comments on Marius’s blog post I installed “blueman” and used it to connect to N900/DUN service. This allowed me to use NetworkManager to connect to internet.

Laptop side: Also BlueDevil and “blueman” are installed but I did not used them. Instead I altered default routing and got crazy setup: laptop -wifi-> router -ethernet-> desktop -bluetooth-> n900 -gprs-> internet.

Setup works properly. Modem still blinks with “DS” led…

Home network speed++

2009-10-05T14:50:00+02:00

Year ago I signed contract with my current ISP (UPC Poland) and got 10Mbps download with 1Mbps upload via cable modem. Few months ago they bumped download speed to 15Mbps but I would have to pay half of month price to get that speed so I refused to upgrade.

Then were vacations… During which they started with new offer — up to 120Mbps… But as this speed is available only in few cities in Poland I got 25Mbps download with 1.5Mbps upload rate. So far I got 19Mbps during my real time tests (fetching from few servers at one time).

So after 10 years I have faster network connection then when my Amiga 1200 got connected to Internet (it was 10Base-T Ethernet). Upload is still slower but I do not have big files to upload for clients so can live with that 1.5Mbps.

Hacking UI for small resolutions

2009-07-16T12:36:00+02:00

One of devices which I have on desk is BUG on which we are using Connection Manager (connman) to manage Ethernet/WiFi connections. It works nice but there are problems with connman-gnome (small application which shows information from connman).

The problem is that we have QVGA resolution screen and UI for connman-gnome expects at least VGA. The result is not nice:

Original look

The main part of screen is occupied by list of network interfaces and nothing more can be seen.

I lack GTK+ skills to rewrite application to have more sane UI but decided to try anyway. Dropped most of spacings, icons were removed (there is ‘Connected/Not Connected’ text for each interface), changed width of widgets and application is more usable now:

New look

Some spacing should be added in few places but other then that it looks better then it was before.

Is it time to replace WRT54GS?

2008-12-04T21:50:00+01:00

Since few months I have 10/1Mbps network connection (downlink/uplink). Recently it was downgraded to 1/1Mbps and I had no idea why. Finally it appeared that my router was the problem…

Exact reason was QoS which I enabled few days ago. It looks like DD-WRT which I use now can not handle it on WRT54GS without degrading network speed. For now I disabled this but it is not an option because I plan to use VoIP more in next months so I need warranty that it will get all bandwidth it needs never mind what else would be running.

Current plans are to make use of Alix 1.c which I have from PC Engines. Soon I will have nice case for it so the only things to buy will be miniPCI WiFi card (friends suggested getting one of Atheros based ones) and 1GbE network card. I already have 2GB CompactFlash for rootfs and spare 2.5” hdd which will be used for storage.

This configuration should be fast enough to have more functions then just router/AP. I plan to make it also printer/scanner server and probably there will be some more to add.

Upgraded home network

2008-09-17T13:48:00+02:00

Today I unpacked new Ethernet switch — D-Link DSG-1008D “green” edition. It has 8 GbE ports so I hooked my devices:

Linksys WRT54GS
desktop with on-board Realtek 8111/8168 card
Lenovo T61 with Intel 82566M card
Dell D400 with Broadcom BCM5705M card

In theory only router is 100Mbps — rest are 1GbE devices. But not quite… I was unable to get Intel adapter (which use “e1000e” driver) to switch to full speed — it used only 100Mbps speed. Tried ethtool -s eth0 speed 1000 but it refuses :(

What was a reason? Wrong cable… I tested all my Ethernet cables and it looks like I am out of real cat5e cables… This will have to wait then until I will end organizing my workplace as there will be rewiring of everything done.

And the Lenovo T61 working on 100Mbps only is not a problem as this machine soon goes back to it’s owner.