Recently I’ve come around an old access point that I completely forgot about.
It’s a Wi-Next Naawigo Mini N that, years ago, I put in a closet bacause it had a locked firmware that made it useless.
When I saw it again I tought it could be of some use if only I could manage to flash OpenWrt on it.
Well, I took it apart and discovered something very interesting:
A quick visit to Google Search and Google Images revealed that this board is a common Compex WPE72, already supported by OpenWrt!
I also learnt that its stock firmware is based on a customized OpenWrt distribution by Wi-Next.
Once installed, it shows up in device manager as “Atheros AR5005G Wireless Network Adapter”.
I had problems connecting to WPA2 protected networks, probably due to unsupported AES encryption.
Setting your router wireless security to “WPA/WPA2” and “TKIP+AES” should solve the issue.
This is how I built a powerful Wi-Fi ADSL router, using my ALIX2D3 (previously running PFsense), a spare USB ADSL modem (Trust MD-3100) and a CM9 atheros-based miniPCI card.
I’m working with Gabor, the ADM5120 target mantainer of OpenWrt. He’s interested in officially supporting this boards. Our purpose is to dump the original bootloader to build OpenWrt images that doesn’t need bootloader replacement. Stay tuned!
OpenWrt forum discussion is located here: http://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=19682
UPDATE 25 June 2009 12:50
Gabor officially relased the port this morning!
Details here:
https://dev.openwrt.org/changeset/16558
And forum thread here:
http://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=20811
Original bootloader dump should arrive soon!
Information found on this page may be partially outdated. I’ll provide a newer version ASAP!
Outer look...
HowTo install OpenWrt Kamikaze 8.09 on OSBRiDGE 5GXi/5XLi wireless CPEs… I’ve been working on this port for months so, please, leave a comment if you find this page useful!
At the moment, works only in NAT mode, no eth0/wlan0 bridging. For this feature, we’ll have to wait for future releases.
If you get poor data rates over your wireless it’s ath5k driver fault, it’s not stable yet, and lot of features arn’t yet implemented. What? Madwifi you say? Oh well, it just don’t fit in our flash while ath5k does! 🙁
And forget dropbear and web interface, there’s no room for them. We’ll use telnet for remote management. (unsecure… I know)
