I just picked up one of these TM02's and saw in an Amazon review mention of OpenWrt.   I'm totally new here, and while I haven't opened command line for probably a year or two, back in the day I set up my own linux webserver to host my blog and podcast and such.  So I have SOME experience, but am not a seasoned pro by any means.

Why should I install OpenWrt?  If I primarily want to use it to serve up movies for the kids to watch on a Galaxy, Kindle Fire, iPad and iPhone, will switching to OpenWrt give me better options?

Also, I have always been vaguely interested in the PirateBox project.  I was able to find one related post, but it wasn't clear if it would work on it.  Think it would be a good solution for it?

Finally...  if I do install the basic package of OpenWrt from the first post in this thread...  Does it function the same way the original factory software does but have options to do even more?  Or will it require significant tweaking to get it to do the basic functions, namely bridging wired connections, relaying wireless ones, sharing files, etc....

Thanks.  Sorry for the newb dump.  I've spent a bunch of time reading posts, but I feel like I'm playing CSI OpenWrt.  hoping someone with the 411 can give me the straight scoop!

The 5350 lacks the CPU power to transcode movies in real time.  I doubt the stock firmware does anything other than stream files out as-is to your mobile device.  But to teach42, you should use the stock firmware to do that because it is set up to plug and play and likely interfaces with their app in a proprietary manner that OpenWRT will be unable to emulate.

USB cams encode the video in the camera (to jpeg, mjpeg*, or h264) to save bandwidth on the USB bus.  One of the v4l utilities has a way to show the capabilities of your camera.
* mjpeg is literally just a stream of jpegs that have been taken one after the other at a high rate.  Each frame is a separate self-contained jpeg picture.

Some of the generic iPad video players claim they do the transcoding within the iPad itself, and send the stream out thru the App.
I did suggest he get one for his kids with the stock firmware, to make things easy for himself, while having a second one for his own experiments with OpenWRT.

Heck...I have three(3) TM02 ...two with OpenWRT, one new build, and one older build I may also update, ...and the 3rd with the stock firmware, to keep testing the newer iPad HooToo App updates.

One thing I know, for a fact, is OpenWRT is better at bridging and relaying or repeating than the stock firmware.
I couldn't connect to my ISP's wifi hotspot with the standard HooToo firmware, but was able to bridge that hotspot to the Ethernet port to have my PC connect to the internet, without any other access to the internet.

So OpenWRT does give advantages...!

Curious, have any of you gotten a browser up and running on the TM02 yet? Digging through the packages, doesn't look like there's a elinks/lynx/etc install in the current list.

Sorry if this is something stupid that I've done, but I've been trying to setup my TM04 to act as a router from one wifi network and rebroadcast its own SSID and Masquarade the traffic. The host is in the WWAN and the new network is in lan, along with the ethernet port.

I got it working by adding the host network as a client, and my own network as a master, but it disconnects within 5-10 seconds every time i connect to it until i remove one of the wifi networks.

This is really useful at hotels, so I'm hoping I'm just doing it wrong.

I'm happy to provide any other details that are useful, but I'm new to Openwrt and couldnt really find an example of how to do this.  I used the Luci interface to set it up, since it seemed much easier than figuring out the CLI.

Thanks for your help!

Hi leafman,
This is different router but very similar configuration. Obviously you will be interested only in part of the instructions below. I found it very useful. Hope this helps.

http://ediy.com.my/index.php/blog/item/ … s-n-router

I found that if you are connected to hootoo wirelesly and want to change external SSID (new hotel--> new network) your own network will be deleted and you will lose connection to the router. Then you will need wired connection to set up your own network again. I just plugged additional WiFi dongle into usb port on the router so one SSID is assigned to radio0 and the other to radio1.  Wifi dongle (WN822N) I used has exceptional reception which is perfect solution for weak hotel WiFi. Also there is no connectivity or stability issues when changing networks.  The only thing is that WN822N is almost twice the size of the router...

This is basically what I did, however the connection was very unstable, I'm hoping theres something I can do to fix it, as I dnt really want to travel with another nic just to solve that, i'd rather go back to the crappy hootoo firmware

It did work while i had the connection but it wouldnt keep the connection for more than a few seconds at a time.

Appreciate the help though.

If you had connection stability issues with both firmware types (OpenWRT and HooToo)
I'm guessing there may be a defect within the router you received from Amazon.

You may want to send it back and try another replacement device to see.
It's no sense keeping it if it was also not holding the connection using the original HooToo firmware.
It should have worked, as it did for others.

(Last edited by HooTooJunkie on 2 May 2015, 00:57)

Sorry I think you misunderstood, it worked on the hootoo firmware, and not on OpenWRT, so if anything I will have to go thru the process to revert but I'd like the extra functionality of OpenWRT if I can fix the issue.

Thanks

Yes I must have misunderstood, when you said, after mentioning you'd rather go back to the crappy HooToo firmware, that it disconnected after a few seconds...I thought you also meant the HooToo firmware.

leafman wrote:
This is basically what I did, however the connection was very unstable, I'm hoping theres something I can do to fix it, as I dnt really want to travel with another nic just to solve that, i'd rather go back to the crappy hootoo firmware 
It did work while i had the connection but it wouldnt keep the connection for more than a few seconds at a time. 

What's the NIC for that you need to also carry around with the HooToo TM02 ?
Sorry if I'm beating on a dead horse, I'm just trying to see of this can be solved without reverting back to the stock FW, and just need the Nano without any additional NIC hardware.

It could be solved by reverting, the other nic was suggested by another user that would help by running each SSID on a seperate radio.  I more wondered if it was possible in OpenWRT as I like the flexibility and things like being able to use a USB hub, bridging the wifi and ethernet which you cant do on stock and such.  Currently I can use the Nano by itself on the hootoo firmware, on openWRt it will work for 5-10 seconds at a time but it drops the wifi connection repeatidely. 

Thanks again

(Last edited by leafman on 2 May 2015, 01:53)

You are trying to do a routed client, where the router is actually routing multiple users back to one wan connection that looks like one user to the hotel, right? 

It is probably a good idea to NOT use the same SSID for your generated "relay" AP as the one you are client on.  I think you mentioned that at first.  Also of course the wan and lan IPs need to be in a different subnet.  Sometimes it works (sort of) if they are in the same subnet but overall that is not right.

Yes this is what I'm doing. And in fact have succeeded after messing around a lot, and resetting my hootoo several times. 

The key to getting it working seems to be the order of the wifi networks in the wifi page.  If you put the host network first, then add your master mode network afterwards, it'll lock the channel properly and it seems stable now.

When I did this originally, I had created my master network then went and added a connection to the hotel, likely it didnt attach the channels properly and was cycling back and forth creating my issue.  Youd think its an easy bug to reorder them to solve that but I'm not the developer of this code ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Very happy with this an thankful to those who contributed to making this possible Kudos all round.  I'm typing on wifi, connected to my HooToo TM-04, thats connected to a mifi spot for testing (this hotels wifi is just abysmal )

I know this has been discussed more or less previously (leafman), and apologies, however I have been trying to get my networking setup for 2 days now:

What I want, is essentially to have the same 'bridging' ability as the stock HooToo. I mainly will use this device at home, as a torrent client and minidlna, however I would like to also be able to take it with me travelling, where I could use it to connect to a hotel wifi and then broadcast that wifi on a separate network, like the HooToo stock firmware can do. Ideally, I would like to also be able to send that wi-fi through the ethernet socket too, however that is not crucial.

I have tried connecting to my home wi-fi from luci and then setting up an access point on the same channel, however I am confused by the 'lan' 'wwan' firewall zone settings.
I want the HooToo to connect using DHCP to accept a random IP: while this may seem counterintuitive if I want to access it from home, my main router (is terrible) assigns static IPs to connected devices by logging their MAC address, so I can assign a static IP at home through the router, but would like to be able to accept whatever IP when connecting to a hotel.

I'm sorry if that wasn't clear - I'm sleep deprived

(Last edited by pkilfeather1 on 2 May 2015, 10:12)

So the lan is the new local network that the hootoo is creating, ie the access point you created, while WWAN is wireless wan or your host network, make sure the subnets are different ie if your home router is 192.168.0.x you need to setup the hootoo to run the new ap as 192.168.1.x or anything other than the same one as your home router. The zones are just used to tell hootoo what the network is for routing requests properly.

To get the new local network shared to the ethernet jack, you can simply add the eth0 interface to the lan, or bridge it with the lan wifi.

To get proper dhcp leases it sounds like you will need to modify settings on your home router, as that is not something controlled by the hootoo per se.  If you look through its settings you may be able to find a lease time that you can shorten.

Hope that helps, without more info its tough to give you anything else.

OK I'll give that a shot when I get home.

So I will connect to my home router via wireless, assign it to the lan zone. Will create an access point also assigned to the lan zone on a different subnet to the client wifi. Will add eth0 to the lan zone.

With regard to dhcp leases, what I meant is that I just want the wwan to connect and accept whatever IP it is given. At home, my main router recognises its mac address and always assigns it a certain IP, whereas when travelling, it will just get assigned anything.

I will report how it goes, thank you!

Correct except your home router is assigned to WWAN, since its the 'internet' or WAN connection for as far as the hootoo is concerned, same thing at a hotel.

The feed from the internet is wan.  A 'wan' network and firewall zone is properly set up by default.  There is no need to make a new network named 'wwan' though the wifi interface serving the wan usually is called that.  Put your client mode wifi interface as the only one in the wan network.  Be sure the "bridge" box under wan physical settings is UNchecked.  Everything eise (the AP and the ethernet) should be moved to lan.

Also as someone else noted, make the client mode one the first one under wifi and then add an AP as the second one, not the other way around.  Even at that you may find the AP dropping on and off the air if the wan connection is not made.  You should do your setup over ethernet rather than wifi to avoid this causing problems.

(Last edited by mk24 on 2 May 2015, 15:02)

Thank you for the instructions guys, I appreciate your help.  I will update this evening when I know the outcome.

EDIT:  On a sidenote, and for those interested; I have managed to install rTorrent and screen (for the purposes of being able to keep rTorrent running in the background after I close the ssh shell) on the HooToo and it seems to cope quite well with downloading to a USB hard drive. I restrict the client to downloading one file at a time; I believe I read somewhere that the memory usage of rTorrent is dependent upon the number of connected peers, not number of torrents, so I may experiment with getting a balance between simultaneous downloads and reduced maximum connected peers.

I have not tried to set up a webui for rTorrent as the instructions on the internet describe using a different http server to uhttpd. Also, the terminal interface is quite easy to use

(Last edited by pkilfeather1 on 2 May 2015, 15:33)

I have a question, regarding bridging (or is it relaying) to a home routers wifi that also has MAC address restrictions turned on, as well as the encryption password.

I obviously need to enter the HooToo MAC address on the allowed list of the home router before I can expect the home router to connect with the HooToo wirelessly...
...but I see several MAC address' listed within the LuCI UI from the HooToo OpenWRT interface.

Which one is the actual one the home router needs to have entered into it's allowed MAC list?

(Last edited by HooTooJunkie on 3 May 2015, 00:56)

Does anyone know how to go back to original wingspinner's OpenWrt? Do I need just flash this  openwrt-ramips-rt305x-ht-tm02-squashfs-factory-r44945-ws.bin  in Luci?  I am currently running one of the latest images from the trunk and just had another reset. I am not very good at terminal and setting everything up from start it is rather tedious process.  Wingspinner's image has Luci built-in and will be more new user friendly in case of losing all settings.  I had a few random resets and lost access to hootoo on a few occasions so  having Luci from the beginning would be great help.

(Last edited by newuser25 on 2 May 2015, 18:47)

Use 'ifconfig -a' to see the MAC (HWaddr) of each of your interfaces (the -a shows All interfaces, even those that are not "up" or connected).  You will need to add the MAC of your HooToo's wifi client interface to your home router's allowed list before it will allow connection.  This is the only MAC that the home router will care about.

Generally you can't flash a "factory" image from OpenWrt, that is what sysupgrade images are for.  The factory image has a special header that factory firmware expects to see.

(Last edited by mk24 on 3 May 2015, 02:22)

The simplest way is just to open ports 80 and 22 into the router from the wan side, then you can use LuCI or ssh respectively from your PC in the home router's network.  Give the TM02 a reserved address (in the 200.x range) in your home router's dhcp table so you can find it.

The usual AP-client link can only handle one MAC address as the client, so you have to route through it you can't bridge a bunch of stuff through.  There is a way to work around that but I have never tried.  My home network is mostly mesh-based which avoids that problem.

(Last edited by mk24 on 3 May 2015, 14:30)

If all that you are trying to do is get a hard drive directory listing to check the status of your torrents, you can use uHTTPd. If you are using LuCI, uHTTPd is already installed. Assuming that you have your hard drive mounted at /mnt/sda1 and you want to list the contects of the hard drive mp3 folder, you could do the following while logged into your TM02.

cd /www
ln -s /mnt/sda1/mp3

Now you can get a directory listing of the hard drive mp3 folder by pointing your web browser to http://192.168.1.1/mp3. You can repeat the above for any other directories on your hard drive.

If you want to make things a little nicer, you can copy the index.html file in the /www directory to luci.html. You can create a new index.html in the /www directory containing the following.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
  <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
  <title>OpenWrt Media Server</title>
</head>
<body>
<div align="Center">
<h1>Welcome to OpenWrt Media Server</h1>
<hr>
<div align="Left">
<h2>Media Directories:</h2>
<ul>
  <li>
    <a href="mp3">Music Directory</a>
  </li>
  <li>
    <a href="video1">Video Directory I</a>
  </li>
  <li>
    <a href="video2">Video Directory II</a>
  </li>
  <li>
    <a href="Calibre">E-Book Directory</a>
  </li>
</ul>
<hr>
<div align="Center">
  <small>
    Music and Video directories are also available through UPnP/DLNA and NFS
  </small></div>
</html>

You can now simply navigate to http://192.168.1.1 to get a listing of your hard drive directories. Note that you can download and stream files from these directories as well. You must now navigate to  http://192.168.1.1/luci.html in order to access LuCI.

If you have a Linux PC, you can also get a directory listing by mounting the TM02 with sshfs.

• Install the openssh-sftp-server package.

• On your Linux PC, create a directory called tm02.

• On your Linux PC, issue the following command: sshfs root@192.168.1.1:/ tm02. Note that there is a space between the / and tm02.

You can now copy, delete, edit, and create files on your TM02, even the hard drive mounted on the TM02 by using your Linux PC file manager.

Thank you, that is quite helpful!! I am actually using an sftp server package that I use with Panic Transmit to remotely mount the hard drive at the moment, but it would be pretty cool to host an html directory listing.

I've managed to establish a routed AP through my HooToo - thanks for your help guys!