My father-in-law, a United Methodist pastor, was just appointed to a new church. He wanted to get wireless setup to work with his HP laptop that I helped him purchase a while back along with a wireless network that I setup in his house.

Of course, being a church pastor, he is always trying to make sure they don't have to spend a lot of money. I happened to have an extra Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 wireless router that I knew would be perfect for his church, especially if I loaded the excellent dd-wrt firmware replacement.

Then I'd be able to use all the amazing functionality that isn't provided with the default firmware from Buffalo. I'd be able to get in remotely with vpn to help him for anything if needed. I could setup local DNS for other network devices if needed. I could also attach securely via ssh if needed. Who wouldn't want to do that? For the life of me I can't figure out why Buffalo or any of the other vendors that use Linux on their routers don't allow people to use the full power of it. I guess it would make their other over priced versions of that equipment totally useless and obsolete if you could do everything a $400 dollar router does by paying $40.

I followed the wiki article from the dd-wrt.com web site. There is a Linux section for TFTP on Buffalo routers that I used a basis to install dd-wrt. However, I found the directions to type all this stuff into the tftp terminal session and quickly try and cut and paste in text to be rather silly. Instead I wrote a small bash script and used a text file to send commands to the tftp session.

tftprouter.sh:

#!/bin/bash
tftp < tftp.txt

 

tftp.txt

binary
trace
rexmt 1
connect 192.168.11.1
put dd-wrt.v24_vpn_whr-g125.bin
quit

Now, instead of having to type this stuff over and over again, I could just run the bash file. If anyone decides to use my little script, you will have to remember to put the script and the bin file in the same directory or use fully qualified paths. Also, please don't forget to change the bin file name if you use a different or updated bin file.

Once I got all that done I thought it would be easy going. I was wrong. For some reason, no matter what I did, I could not connect through my wireless card using WPA. It worked fine with no encryption and with WEP. But frankly if you can't get WPA working, you might as well use nothing at all. I could not in good conscience allow a church to be exposed to anything weird so WPA was a must. I racked my brain for 3 hours and looked up all kinds of articles through Google, but to no avail.

I let it sit a week, and then it hit me. On the Wireless Basic configuration tab there is a setting for whether it is bridged or unbridged. It was set to bridged by default. It seems like a strange default to have. I remembered reading that WPA doesn't work well with bridged connections. So I clicked the "unbridged" setting. The router reset and all of a sudden my laptop wireless card connected! So I wasted about 3-4 hours on something that took 30 seconds to fix. Isn't that how it always works?

I'm going drop it off at his church this week sometime. He'll be a very happy man once I get wireless up and running in the church!