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Ewrt        


ewrt is a linux distribution for the Linksys WRT54G wireless router. It was forked from the Sveasoft Samadhi2 distribution by Irving Popovetsky and Brandon Psmythe of Portless Networks, a wireless networking company in Portland, OR.

See the slides from our presentation at the PersonalTelco monthly meeting

The goal of the project is to maintain a stable and secure platform for use in enterprise and wireless ISP environments while providing key features to compete with commercial-grade wireless solutions like Cisco and Proxim.
 
At the time of writing, ewrt differentiates itself from the other WRT54G distributions by providing a captive portal based on NoCatSplash, has many bugs fixed over Linksys and Sveasoft, and provides an open, transparent development model.
 
Key Features:

  • NoCatSplash -based captive portal
  • Traffic shaping with Wondershaper+iproute2
  • SSH and telnet management
  • Wireless transmit power selection, client mode, Adhoc, WDS
  • RSSI stats reporting for invidual clients
  • Remote syslogging
 
All of our testing and development is focused on the version 2 (v2) hardware which is a 200mhz MIPS processor, 4mb flash and 16mb of memory.  For more information on the hardware see the Wiki page at SeattleWireless:
http://www.seattlewireless.net/index.cgi/LinksysWrt54g


Download the latest firmware:


Version
  0.2 final
Released
 10/12/2004
md5sums
 MD5 (ewrt-0.2.bin) = b672b94cf10b7ab2cdb138902396f257
MD5 (ewrt-0.2.tar.gz) = 4cc47a8961e684eeb13f6c80f6a22e0d
Download
 Ewrt 0.2 firmware image (2.8MB)
Ewrt 0.2 Source code (52MB)
Changelog:
  • Fixed cron startup by restoring link from /etc/cron.d to /tmp/cron.d
  • Re-enable check_ps and hook up splashd, syslogd and dropbear
  • Don't link ssh to scp, we don't have ssh client functionality
  • Remove timestamp checks from the nocat Makefile that break the build
  • Clamp MSS to PMTU for all cases and fix MSS issues for PPTP users as well.
  • Added a whole boatload of additional nocat variables and prefix them with NC_
  • Fixed the logic surrounding whether to start the "start_wds_init" scripts or not.
  • README fixes
  • Add du and df to busybox
  • Remove a timestamp check from the OpenSSL makefile that breaks the build
  • Add a sleep before starting nocat in services.c, which broke nocat startup for some users

Version
  0.2 beta1
Released
 04/27/2004
md5sums
 ewrt-0.2-beta1.bin 0739213d41ca78930cabf4148ff6510c
ewrt-0.2-beta1.tar.gz 72d50a4aecdba81242248e3f0f4cc54b
Download
 Ewrt 0.2 beta1 firmware image (2.8MB)
Ewrt 0.2 beta1 Source code (52MB)
Changelog:
  • imported code from Linksys 2.02.2 and 2.02.7
  • imported glib 1.2.10 and NocatSplash, fixed bugs and portability issues
  • Added rc functionality for generating nocat.conf at boot and starting splashd
  • Web page control for NocatSplash
  • (sortof) fixed remote syslogging
  • more build fixes
  • Allow users to explicitly use a default gateway on the LAN interface instead of the WAN interface
  • document the `nvram commit` function, warn users about it


Version
  0.1
Released
 03/28/2004
Download
 not released
Changelog:
  • Proof of concept release
  • Cleaned up the build process a bit
  • Fixed traffic shaping
  • Build process documentation


Anonymous CVS access

To log into cvs, set your $CVSROOT environment variable to be:
:pserver:anoncvs@cvs.portless.net:/home/cvs/cvsroot

do a `cvs login` and give "anoncvs" as your password

Be aware that if you do a simple cvs -z3 co ewrt, you are getting
an entire linux kernel distribution from the CVS server. Please don't abuse
our bandwidth too much!

Browse the CVS repository

http://portless.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/ewrt/

Mailing lists:

Developer list: ewrt-devel (at) portless (dot) net
CVS commit logs: ewrt-cvs (at) portless (dot) net

Contact the developers at ProStructure

Further reading

  • ProStructure Consulting:  http://www.prostructure.com
  • The Seattlewireless Linksys WRT54G page: http://www.seattlewireless.net/index.cgi/LinksysWrt54g
  • The Sveasoft Forums: http://www.sveasoft.com/modules/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=6
  • Jim Buzbee's Batbox wrt54g Linux distribution: http://www.batbox.org/wrt54g-linux.html
  • Rob Flickenger?s splash54g: http://nocat.net/~rob/wrt54g/
  • Linksys GPL code center:  http://www.linksys.com/support/gpl.asp
  • The OpenWRT project:  http://openwrt.ksilebo.net/
  • The Wifi-box project:  http://wifi-box.sourceforge.net/

Newsfeeds
Wi-Fi Networking News
Wed, 09 Feb 2005 09:39
Blackberry 7100XHey, don't get excited--this new Blackberry doesn't have cell access: The Blackberry 7270 has Wi-Fi built in as well as a VoIP client, but there's no cellular radio inside, reports Techworld. Instead, it's designed as a campus-wide enterprise tool that combines voice and messaging. Campus-wide pager systems have been widespread and there's a growing use of VoIP over Wi-Fi; this is a neat combination of both. But it means some executives will now have to carry two Blackberrys.
Wi-Fi Blackberry
Now you see it, now you don't: The New Millennium Research Council has removed the page listing its board of directors. On their About page, it used to have a link to the board and to internships. Now just look at it. The NMRC was behind the report that came out last week agitating against municipal broadband; they are owned by Issue Dynamics, a PR firm representing cable and telephone companies, including Verizon.If we take the WayBack Machine from the Internet archive and set it to Feb. 2004, we can see that Karen Buller, Allen Hepner, Barbara O'Connor, and Jorge Schement are listed as board members. When I saw this page a few days ago, Allen--identified as affiliated with Issue Dynamics back then--was relegated to a contact page where he is listed as executive director. Buller was listed as the chair of the board. I'm unclear who funds her organization as this information isn't provided on their site. The National Indian Telecommunications Institute seems to have great goals and is widely cited across the Net as a progressive force. But Buller sits as a member of the board of directors of the Alliance for Public Technology (APT) alongside Barbara O'Connor, the founding chair. The APT states on its board of directors page that "Membership is open to all nonprofit organizations and individuals, not members of the affected industries." However, inexplicably, the sponsors and affiliates page lists BellSouth, SBC, and Verizon. The statement about this is that "These affiliates provide a portion of APT's financial support but do not vote or serve on its Board of Directors." That's a great non-denial denial, just like the Heartland Institute's very specific note that no donor provides more than 10 percent of their budget.If you view the HTML at APT's Web site, the first comment reads: "Designed and developed by Issue Dynamics, Inc. For more information see http://www.idi.net". Welcome to another arm of IDI. The Executive Director, Sylvia Rosenthal is "also Assistant Vice President of Issue Dynamics Inc. where she devotes her time exclusively to management of APT." The group is linked via SourceWatch.Jorge Schement is a professor at Penn State and a co-director of the Institute for Information Policy, which lists Issue Dynamics and Verizon among their sponsors.Am I going to wake up with a horse's head in my bed? I'm a fish-a-tarian. Could it be a full-sized Tofurkey, instead? [Thanks to Karl Bode of DSL and Broadband Reports; he can have half a horse's head.]
NMRC Pulls Its Board of Directors Page