OpenWrt setup for home on Raspberry PI 4
January 12, 2021 · 302 words · 2 min
This has worked for a short time, but was never finished, as in the end I’ve abandoned this project in favor of a little GL.iNet GL-AR750S-Ext which I carry around on trips.
The text here is still revelant as a snapshot, and maybe I’ll want to resume this.
After drooling at Mikrotik or a similar powerful router for my home infra for over a month - I remembered that I had an RPI laying at home somewhere, all alone and forgotten.
2+2 came together pretty quickly after short google and confirmation that OpenWrt(which I heard about back in the day) fits well on this RPI version and actually can output 1Gb/s speeds.
So I had to scratch my head for some searching for a quick-start guide, which wasn’t really simple to find. The docs for OpenWrt require some thinking and understanding before you go brick your device.
To rephrase - there is a quick-start manual, but it’s not very much useful for RPI 4, so I collected a short n’ sweet guide for RPI 4 below. Anyway - it’s important that you go over the quickstart page and related links to understand what is this beast.
OpenWrt installation
Currently, there’s no stable release supporting RPI4, but it’s working pretty good with snapshot, which can be downloaded here:
Factory image: http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/targets/bcm27xx/bcm2711/openwrt-bcm27xx-bcm2711-rpi-4-squashfs-factory.img.gz
Sysupgrade image:
List of all available images built for this target:
https://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/targets/bcm27xx/bcm2711/
Go and install Luci, OpenWrt’s web interface:
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-quick-start/ssh_connect_to_the_internet_and_install_luci
Issues I faced
- You can’t easily have WiFi hotspot in RPI, unless you pick specific country, channel and bandwidth - drivers simply don’t work with that.
OpenWrt configuration
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/generic.sysupgrade
Why this was prompted at all - to upgrade my firmware and install https://forum.openwrt.org/t/vpn-policy-based-routing-web-ui-discussion/10389
because it requires a newer kernel than I have, and OpenWrt advising against upgrading the kernel with opkg.