OpenWRT Travel Router

I recently posted about my purchase of the GL.iNet GL-AR300M16 which I of course immediately flashed with OpenWRT. As this was intended as a travel router it came along with us on a recent vacation. Above you can see the tiny little GL.iNet device plugged via the WAN port into one of the LAN ports of the internet router of the rental we had.

The GL.iNet isn’t a speedy device – with only a single 2.4GHz wireless connection it wasn’t able to saturate the internet connection (200Mbps symmetric) but I was still getting pretty reasonable speeds (~50Mbps).

I had setup the travel router to have a “travel” SSID, and could associate all of the devices we’d brought (6) to that. Sure this is a setup step, but for future trips I’ll only have to setup the travel router and all the devices will connect to the “travel” SSID.

As an aside, I’ll mention that I’ve started to bring my Roku when we travel, this way I have a familiar movie/show watching experience and I don’t have to remember to clear any passwords when I leave because I take the box with me.

Where it gets more interesting, is that I configured the travel router as a wireguard client. Pretty much following my post on OpenWRT as a wireguard client verbatim. I did set up the allowed_ips as a /24 CIDR block – effectively creating a split VPN – so that traffic targeted at my ‘home’ network would flow over wireguard, but other traffic would go directly to the internet. The benefit to this VPN setup is that if I’m streaming a movie on Netflix, that traffic will bypass the wireguard tunnel and when I want to reach a “local to my home network” service like homeassistant, it just works like at home.

Then as icing on the cake, I fiddled with the DNS options so that any address handed out by the travel router gets my pi-hole as the DNS server. If you want to do something similar check out my pi-hole setup post that talks about this configuration in OpenWRT. This gives me ad-blocking and my personal block lists. This helps keep the internet a little bit more family friendly, plus no ads!

I did experience a couple of network hangs,  4 over the week long trip, but a quick power cycle of the router and we were back in business. I suspect that this may have been either high load, or heat, that triggered the problem. The limitation of only 2.4GHz networking didn’t seem to be a big deal, and I got reasonable WiFi coverage over a 3 floors of a townhome.

This setup was pretty awesome. It gave me a ‘at home’ network experience, while I was away from home. What a great little box.

As a bonus, let’s dive into another travel configuration. I’m writing this post from a hotel room, connected to the travel router. Now the hotel doesn’t have a wired ethernet port, so I need to do something slightly different.

There is an OpenWRT package “travel-mate” that makes this more complicated setup easy. We want to operate in AP+STA (access point + station) mode, where the single wifi radio is doing both jobs. Many routers can do this, the GL.iNet is one of them.

The travel-mate documentation is a little sparse, but there is a long and fairly active forum thread that provides help. I was able to get it working with a little bit of stumbling around.

Installing two packages: travelmate and luci-app-travelmate will get you going. An OpenWRT menu “Services->Travelmate” will appear in the web UI, allowing you to access the configuration.

A newly installed travel-mate will have blank information, mine is a capture from a running version.

You’ll need to do a one time “Interface Wizard” to get the interfaces setup. This should create some trm_ network interfaces. I did this once and have forgotten about the details, you can probably safely do the same.

When you are ready to connect to the upstream WiFi (say the hotel’s internet) you will want to visit the “Wireless Station” tab and scan for, and select a SSID to connect to.

There is some magic I don’t yet fully understand about configuring a login script to bypass the captive portal that your hotel is likely to have. In my case, my laptop that connected to the travel router was presented with the captive portal webpage and I was able to log in that way (the travel router basically was a proxy for the captive portal). Once logged in, the router was granted access by the hotel WiFi and all other devices connected to the travel router just worked. (yeah, magic)

I’ll just quickly cover the  travel-mate General Settings.

The top red circle is the “Enabled” checkbox. This is handy as you don’t want travel-mate to be active if you’re using the travel router in a wired setup like I was in the top part of this post. Leaving it enabled while in a wired setup will possibly cause WiFi drop outs as it tries to scan for available networks to connect to.

The bottom red circle is checked on by default, by for my use I found that I had to disable it. Otherwise it was disabling my wireguard VPN. With the checkbox cleared, my split VPN is working fine and I’m enjoying the “at home networking, while I’m not at home” experience. It was also pretty nice that my phone and my tablet just connected to the “travel” WiFi once it was up and running.

Since we are using a single radio to both handle the clients (my devices) and talk to the host network (the hotel WiFi) you can expect that the overall speed to be much less. I know this is true as I’ve tested travel-mate in this AP+STA mode with my home network, and seen the difference (I was only able to get about 26Mbps when my home net connection is much faster). The good news here is that hotel WiFi while adequate, isn’t very good, at least not in this hotel.

Here are two speed tests, one via the travel-router, and one directly to the hotel WiFi.

They are basically the same, especially given the variations you’ll see on the hotel WiFi. The key take away here is that using the travel router isn’t imposing any real overhead or limits, and if we had much better hotel WiFi I’d still get acceptable performance.

It is interesting to note that with travel-mate and running in AP+STA mode, and only 3 devices and 1 user .. it was very stable. I didn’t have any hangs or weird problems once it was setup. I’ll certainly bring it along for future trips.

Pixel 4a Screen Protector

The Pixel 4a continues to be my “daily driver”. I still mostly only need to charge it every 2 days, but by the second day the battery is well into the red and I’ve needed to top up to make it through. Using Android Auto in the car (wired) has also changed things a little, as my phone is getting charged while I drive. Still, on a full battery I can go all day.

Of course, battery life is completely related to usage. I have a very modest number of apps, and I spend all day attached to a keyboard so I’m not using the phone very much at all.

I’ve had a screen protector on the phone from day one. My preference, and it seems to be where the industry has gone too, is to have a ‘tempered glass’ screen protector. This particular brand doesn’t even have a selfie camera hole – it’s just a rounded rectangle of glass. I bought these on eBay way back in October 2020 – the listing is still active. I’d recommend this vendor as the product I got was very good, they also carry many other sizes for other phones.

I’ve also got a bumper case on the phone which has saved it from many a drop. I finally got unlucky and dropped it 4 feet onto ceramic tile and the screen protector cracked.

This wasn’t the first tumble onto hard tile, but it finally landed the wrong way and cracked the screen protector. I will say that after being tossed around and living in my pocket for years, the screen protector itself was still in good shape.

As you can see, the damage to the screen protector was pretty obvious.

Since this was a 2 pack of protectors, I had another one waiting to go. Peeling the old one off revealed the pristine 4a screen, exactly what I want to protect.

The protector ships with a couple of generic wipes. After sitting around for a couple of years the wet wipe had dried out. I didn’t need much cleaning power anyways so I just gave it a good wipe down with the dry one.

The screen protector itself has a protective sticker only on one side. This is the screen side. I like to leave it in the foam sleeve until I’m about to install as that helps reduce dust. The install kit comes with a couple of stickers that you use as a ‘hinge’ once you’ve placed the new screen on the phone (with protective sticker still on). Once the hinge is setup, you lift the screen and peel off the protective sticker.

Let the clean screen flop down on the clean phone, and watch the magic ‘bonding’ happen. If you’ve managed to stay dust free, it’ll be a nice clean match up and you’re good to go. I wasn’t so lucky this time.

Yup, a dreaded dust blob between the screen protector and the phone screen. Along with the guide stickers (hinges) you get a dust remover sticker. Gently peel the new screen up, it’ll stay attached due to the sticker hinges. Then dab at the dust blob – in my case it was stuck to the new screen protector, but you can do both sides (gently). The dust remover sticker should pick up the dust and leave a clean surface behind. Re-flop the screen and if you’ve not introduce more dust it should be good to go. Carefully remove the hinge stickers and put the case back on.

Here is a good youtube video on the hinge method for screen installs.

If you need to put a screen on without the stickers – just use scotch tape. It works exactly the same. You want to avoid touching anything directly with your fingers (which are slightly greasy). I’ve installed many screen protectors, and it does get easier – but even someone doing it the first time can succeed if you go slowly and try to be in a dust free location. One hint would be to do this in the bathroom just after you’ve had a shower – the moisture in the air tends to cut down on dust.

For me, screen protectors work well. I’d rather scratch/crack the screen protector than risk a ding in my phone screen. In the past, I’ve used screen protectors to cover up / mask scratches in the screen of a used phone I’ve bought – so even if you have a scratch, a screen protector can help make your phone seem new.

GL.iNet GL-AR300M16 with OpenWRT 22.03.05

When travelling I usually just deal with the internet situation that is provided, I’ve got wireguard if I want to have ad blocking or reach to my home network. The other day I got looking at travel routers, and while TP-Link has some popular ones, the GL.iNet devices seem to have more flash and RAM for basically the same prices.

The GL.iNet AR300M16 was under $40 on amazon.ca, and it shipped (free) in a few days. Look at it, very tiny and cute – but more powerful than the Netgear WNR3500L that I’ve used in the past. The USB power supply I’m using is larger than the router.

Of course, I selected this device with OpenWRT in mind. While the stock firmware has some really nice features as a travel router – I think I can achieve the same things with plain old OpenWRT. The GL.iNet device family apparently uses an OpenWRT base and customizes it. There are a number of GL.iNet devices documented on the OpenWRT site, but nothing specific for the AR300M16. The AR300M is close, but has a different flash module setup.

The first thing I did was just connect to the device, both wireless and wired. I knew that the OpenWRT install was going to require a wired only connection so I wanted to make sure that the laptop I was using was going to be able to successfully connect to the stock firmware over wire.

I was impressed at the quality of the user interface. I may have to give the stock firmware a proper try, but first let’s flash OpenWRT to it.

This turns out to be very easy. The stock firmware ‘local’ upgrade process will accept a .bin file. The OpenWRT firmware selector gives us an easy way to find a compatible firmware for the “GL.iNet GL-AR300M16” device.

I started with the Kernel image. This is the recommended path for moving from stock as it’s a smaller image. The stock firmware was happy to accept this .bin file as an upload, but warned me that I was treading in dangerous waters.

No problem, I know what I’m doing (so I told myself). Hitting “Install” and off we went. I did made sure that before I flashed the firmware I was using a quality USB power supply that delivered more than 2A of power.

This went smoothly, but the IP address of the router changed from 192.168.8.1 to 192.168.1.1. This is a difference between the stock firmware defaults and the OpenWRT defaults.

I then used the OpenWRT firmware upgrade to flash the sysupgrade image. This went smoothly as well. Now I have a teeny tiny router with OpenWRT installed.

Next I need to figure out how I want to configure this particular device to be my travel router, allowing me to connect my devices to it – and have it use another wifi network as the upstream. Then explore adding some ad blocking and some other nice features.