OpenWRT Router Setup

Alx9r's Sample Setup

System Diagram

My internet connection is DSL provided by Telus. That connection is protected by a hardware router/firewall. The "EXTERNAL" network card in the LinuxMCE Core/Hybrid is plugged into that router/firewall. Other media directors will be connected to the "INTERNAL" network.

The system diagram provides a decent overview of the network topology.

I am using a Linksys WRT54GL wireless router v1.1 running OpenWrt/X-WRT.

I ended up making some changes to the router's setup to nicely accomodate the LinuxMCE system. I've described them in the sections below.

User Friendly URLs and Particular IP Addresses

To give the core and laptop orbiter static IP addresses (in this case 192.168.1.102 and 80.1), I added the following line to the WRT54GL's dnsmasq.conf file:

dhcp-host=192.168.1.102,orbiterlaptop
dhcp-host=192.168.80.1,dcerouter

To make the IP addresses map to some user-friendlier names, I added the following line to the WRT54GL's hosts file:

192.168.1.102  orbiterlaptop
192.168.80.1	mc mediacenter mce linuxmce dcerouter

In order to access the 192.168.80.1 address, I changed Network=>WAN-LAN=>Netmask to 255.255.0.0.

With these entries, you can enter http://mce into the address bar of a browser and end up at the admin page. No IP address entry necessary.

Note: Some orbiters need the core to be at 192.168.80.1.

Bittorrent Port Forwarding

Under Network->Firewall, I created a port forwarding entry that looks like this:

Match                     Target          Port	 
Destination Ports: 60000  192.168.1.103   60000

QoS

Under Network->QoS, I configured as follows:

• QoS Service: Enabled
• QoS Overhead Calculation: Enabled
• Wan Upload Speed and Wan Download Speed see below

To get numbers for the two speed fields, I stopped all other internet access and ran a speed test here, then filled in the up and down speeds. I noticed that the speeds reported seem to vary quite a bit over the course of a week. I recommend filling in the worst-case speeds which turned out to be 200/1600 upload/download for my connection. If you overstate the speeds web browsing, email, VoiP, etc will get starved by bittorrent downloads.

Links

• Wikipedia - Linksys WRT54G series
• http://openwrt.org/
• http://x-wrt.org/