Pete S. says:
2015/01/25 at 10:59 pm
Logan –
Your tutorial has been an awesome help! I have had a VPN endpoint (OpenVPN on DD-WRT) setup at home to allow me to have normal (read: US-grade) internet access when I’m in China for work. Previously I had initiated VPN connections on each device, but I had been thinking about doing exactly this… I’ve got a working setup now, and I’m sure it’ll help a lot when I’m next in China!

I’ve made a bunch of minor additions and modifications to the setup, including one to address what I believe is an issue with the Atheros Wifi implementation when the client-mode connection from the MR3020 to another SSID cannot be established (as has been described in some of the comments above):

– I’ve setup the network interfaces to give me WAN (ethernet port) + WWAN (Wifi client mode WAN), and WLAN + LAN (on the same ethernet port as the WAN, but using a vastly different – and hopefully unlikely to ever conflict – static IP address w/ DHCP server disabled on the LAN interface).
– I made the ‘3G’ LED (the one with the globe) a basic indicator of my connection to the internet.
– The ‘WPS’ LED is a VPN status indicator (off = tunnel down, on = tunnel up, heartbeat blink = connection initiated but not up).
– I’ve used the 3-position slider to determine the boot mode (AP = AP only*, WISP = connect to last known network + AP, 3G/4G = connect to last known network + AP + auto-initiate VPN + firewall blocks all LAN->WAN traffic, only allows LAN -> TUN).

* AP only mode copies “safe” versions of the network and wireless config files, guaranteeing that the wireless AP will come up without further interaction. This way, I know I can *always* configure the network/wireless basics for a given location without having to resort to failsafe (particularly important when I don’t have any ethernet enabled devices with me). What I did was save a wireless config file that has the Wifi client interface setup, but cleared (disabled, no SSID, no passphrase, and security set to ‘none’). The AP side of the config remains the same, so my devices will always connect to the MR3020 (and I can use SSH or the web GUI to add the details for the client connection).

Once everything was working, I actually made an instal script that will take you from ‘firstboot’ to fully configured with all of the interfaces, LEDs, and other configuration options ready to go. It is a 4 stage process with reboots in between, and it might be a bit brute-force (it moves some configuration files into place, some of which are custom-configurable prior to installation, and it is pretty dumb – doesn’t detect problems… but it works for me). I’d be happy to share it with you (and you may post it here for others) if you’re interested.

The only thing I have been completely unable to get working is the hotplug events for the WPS button and slider switch (post boot time, that is). Specifically, I cannot seem to get the button presses to register as events (I know the buttons are working, though, since I can manually poll them – but I want hotplug.d to handle that for me). If you’ve got them working, would you mind sharing the scripts?

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