homelab

I got a second Velop WHW03 V1 running OpenWrt

This project went better than my first time around, where I had to fiddle a lot to get the third radio working.

Edit 2025-05-04 Third and final OpenWrt conversion.

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.

EDIT 2025-04-09 I put OpenWrt on a second WHW03 V1 Velop. My notes for that episode are more coherent and complete than these.

Edit 2025-05-04 Third and final OpenWrt conversion.

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.

EDIT 2025-04-15 I put OpenWrt on a second WHW03 V1 Velop. My notes for that episode are more coherent and complete than these.

Edit 2025-05-04 Third and final OpenWrt conversion. This is probably the most concise and useful of the 3 conversion posts.

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.