OpenWrt Forum Archive

Topic: how to install software

The content of this topic has been archived on 5 Apr 2018. There are no obvious gaps in this topic, but there may still be some posts missing at the end.

Hi,
i would like to install some applications on my router, but they are not available as router packages.
As i have no experience with linux whatsoever, i was wondering if someone can explain to me how this is done.

I am interested in running the following applications / features:
i2p ( http://www.i2p2.de/ )
tor ( https://www.torproject.org/ )
email (any, or http://www.xmailserver.org/ )
jabber (any, or http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/ )

also, especially tor and i2p can be quite a heavy load. Is it wise to stuff these in a router?

The router im using is a 400 Mhz linksys WRT160NL router.

scratch the i2p, its not compatible.

Note that currently OpenWRT devices have to few resources to run I2P

trendpoinder2 wrote:

Hi,
i would like to install some applications on my router, but they are not available as router packages.
As i have no experience with linux whatsoever, i was wondering if someone can explain to me how this is done.

I am interested in running the following applications / features:
i2p ( http://www.i2p2.de/ )
tor ( https://www.torproject.org/ )
email (any, or http://www.xmailserver.org/ )
jabber (any, or http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/ )

also, especially tor and i2p can be quite a heavy load. Is it wise to stuff these in a router?

The router im using is a 400 Mhz linksys WRT160NL router.

xmail is available as a pre-compiled package, though it's quite a challenge to get it running.
Essentially, I got xmail runing on a TL-WR1043ND, but it required me to use an extroot file system and swap space on a USB stick, else the router would crash, both using the precompiled package and a bleeding-edge compile. I've set the swap space to about 1 Gig, though it may run with less memory.

Performance is all but great, partly because xmail manages mail mostly in RAM (which, on that router, is swap space), so the bigger the mails get, the slower the overall performance. Plus, when I access the server from the LAN side to retrieve mail, I do it unencrypted, because the encryption slowed down the transfer to only about 10% of the unencrypted speed. Not a superbly safe mode of operation, however one that supplies the mails at about 300 kByte/s, rather than about 30 kByte/s encrypted. In order to keep my primary router operable, I am runing the mail server on a secondary, WLAN-attached router. The primary router that connects to the DSL modem I keep as empty as I can, essentially only running NAT and the firewall.

I also managed to set up telaen web mail on the very same secondary router. That requires a set of other packages to run and be configured, and it's pretty slow, but it does work.
Here, the core problem is that when browsing mail, telaen again does this in RAM (bringing the very same performance issues mentioned above). As telaen uses hard timeouts, bigger mails (>20 MB) cause telaen to time-out. You may be able to bypass this by setting alternative timeout values, but then: what shall those timeouts realistically be? If you'd like it to process 200-MB-Mails, you're going to have to wait for several minutes or even hours until telaen displays them. That's not particularly great.

So, bottom line: xmail does work with some memory/swap tweaks, though not blazingly fast. But I haven't found a web-mailer that would sit on top of it and operate in a reasonable way. If somebody knows a better alternative, please point me to it.

The discussion might have continued from here.