Cerowrt and OpenWrt Barrier Breaker Interoperation

CeroWrt was a research project intended to spin up new functionality into a single, conventional, home router. Nearly everything in the 3.10.50-1 release (and later) was pushed into OpenWrt “Barrier Breaker”, which supports thousands of different router types, however a few things are different, notably cerowrt routes, rather than bridges everything.

HOWTO Configuring an openwrt Barrier Breaker device to be more “cerowrt-like”

Let’s say you have an existing CeroWrt box, and you want to add an Access Point elsewhere on your network. For the sake of this example, we’ll use a Ubnt Picostation, which is a good outdoor access point, with a single ethernet interface, and that you are configuring it from a linux laptop.

First Steps

• Download the nano-m factory firmware update and the babels package from the openwrt repositories

• Install openssh-server and telnet on your laptop.

• Generate an ssh-key for your router with “ssh-keygen” - you can make one specific to administration if you like

• Set your laptop to a static ip of 192.168.1.²⁄₂₄ and then plug it into the pico.

• Boot the Pico. Install Barrier Breaker on the device.

via the firmware upload web interface (it’s on 192.168.1.20) or via the classic tftp update method.

This will get a basic load of the BB OS in place, which you can telnet to on 192.168.1.1 or access via the (unencrypted by default) web gui

• telnet to the device

• Install babels - note the s - on it.

scp from your laptop the babels package you downloaded earlier to /tmp.
opkg install /tmp/babel*
/etc/init.d/babeld enable # but don’t start it yet

While you are here, take your generated ssh public key, and put it in /etc/dropbear/authorized_keys

• Change the IP address range to suit

In this example I will use 172.20.6 throughout. pick your own address range that doesn’t conflict with the cerowrt setup, preferably one inside the same /16 cero is in.

sed -i s/192.168.¹⁄₁₇₂.20.6/g /etc/config/*

• Disable dhcp serving (for now) and make it be a dhcp client (for now)

edit the /etc/config/dhcp file and tell it to “ignore ‘1’” on both interfaces for now

• Give it a name in /etc/config/system

• Kill the firewall

This is an interior router, no need to firewall, particularly during setup.
Feel free to copy the firewall script to a backup, you might want to do some stuff later on it.

Make /etc/config/firewall look like this.

config defaults
        option input 'ACCEPT'
        option output 'ACCEPT'
        option forward 'ACCEPT'

• Reboot. Plug the ethernet into your cerowrt box, the device should now be routed and
  on your network, with a new IP address you can derive from inspecting the /tmp/dhcp.leases file
  or get to via local dns.

Next Steps

• ssh into the router, do a

opkg update # should grab the openwrt BB database if dns is working
opkg install snmpd # if you intend to monitor the system with snmp
opkg install netperf tcpdump-mini # also optional. I like to test with netperf and look at stuff with tcpdump

• Break apart the AP and the wifi

By default openwrt bridges rather than routes. We want to route.

• Setup the wifi

If you want to mesh via ethernet

If you want to mesh via wifi

IMPORTANT: The babel protocol uses the BSSID rather than the SSID to tie radios together, so you need to specify the same one that’s on cerowrt.

If you want to mesh via wifi AND provide service via wifi

Customization

Hit the web gui and add in the appropriate time.

do an opkg list | less and see if there are other packages you’d like to add

You can either disable the gui (I generally do this), or add ssl support to it

• Change the password