homelab

I installed OpenWrt 24.10 on a Linksys Velop WHW03 V1 wireless router. This is the story of how I got all 3 radios it possesses to work.

The mystery of the Belkin heartbeat illustrates what kind of bullshit companies will pull if you buy into their proprietary software, and let them get away with demanding that you run everything through “The App”.

The experience made me check if OpenWrt is available and runs on Linksys Velop hardware.

I noticed that my DNS aggregator, DNSMasq, was periodically getting bursts of queries about “www.belkin.com” and “heartbeat.belkin.com”.

I decided to upgrade my OpenWrt One WiFi router.

I bought an OpenWrt One WiFi router from “Bipai Corp”, via AliExpress.

The list price was $89, I got it for $109 with shipping from China.

I decided my WRT3200ACM Linksys WiFi router is garbage. There’s something about the hardware that neither Linksys factory firmware, nor OpenWrt can deal with. It drops a lot of packets.

I bought an Asus AX6000 TUF gaming router, which is kind of embarrassing, but it supposedly works well with OpenWrt.

When I last had problems with PPP, I noticed that some non-routeable IP addresses ended up getting sent out for DNS reverse lookup.

This is different than routing packets with those same (nominally) non-routeable addresses out into The Internet.

I had to get my production server to clamp MSS (size of TCP data “segment” in bytes) to path MTU.

I run pacman -Syu about once a week on my Arch Linux machines, to stay up-to-date, avoid security problems and generally stay at the bleeding edge of software revisions.

Today, I ran pacman -Syu on my Dell R530 server and it updated the PPP package.

Trouble ensued.