{"id":2138,"date":"2023-05-26T20:52:54","date_gmt":"2023-05-27T00:52:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/?p=2138"},"modified":"2023-05-27T11:38:12","modified_gmt":"2023-05-27T15:38:12","slug":"gl-inet-gl-ar300m16-with-openwrt-22-03-05","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/2023\/gl-inet-gl-ar300m16-with-openwrt-22-03-05\/","title":{"rendered":"GL.iNet GL-AR300M16 with OpenWRT 22.03.05"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When travelling I usually just deal with the internet situation that is provided, I’ve got wireguard<\/a> if I want to have ad blocking<\/a> 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<\/a> devices seem to have more flash and RAM for basically the same prices.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> that I’ve used in the past. The USB power supply I’m using is larger than the router.<\/p>\n

Of course, I selected this device with OpenWRT<\/a> 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<\/a> is close, but has a different flash module setup.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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

I started with the Kernel<\/code> 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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

This went smoothly, but the IP address of the router changed from 192.168.8.1<\/code> to 192.168.1.1<\/code>. This is a difference between the stock firmware defaults and the OpenWRT defaults.<\/p>\n

I then used the OpenWRT firmware upgrade to flash the sysupgrade<\/code> image. This went smoothly as well. Now I have a teeny tiny router with OpenWRT installed.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “GL.iNet GL-AR300M16 with OpenWRT 22.03.05”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-how-to","category-network"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2138"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2146,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2138\/revisions\/2146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}