OpenWrt - FOSS Firmware For Your Router

routers there's something we all have but it's something that we rarely think about despite it being an absolutely essential device for internet connectivity in any home small office and even in Enterprise environments where you might have multiple access points overlapping throughout a cubicle space and then they all are ultimately wired back to one or more routers that provide them with internet access but despite this critical piece of infrastructure being so well critical people rarely think about the software and the firmware that are running on their routers people rarely update the firmware on their routers and they rarely verify that they have a secure configuration when they plug them in which is why they make such an excellent foothold for hackers to penetrate your network why bother compromising a receptionist PC and have to get through firewall rules to Pivot to a more important device when you can just compromise the router directly you can own the firewall and become a remote black hat network administrator for a vulnerable Enterprise but I know that my long-term subscribers they don't have that particular issue their routers are up to date with the latest firmware and using secure configurations but have you ever considered that the firmware that's running on your router might be absolutely proprietary if you're running closed Source software on your router or any other device for that matter it's practically impossible to know for sure what is being done with the data that goes through it for all you know every single IP packet from every device on your network is being sent to the CIA mad and the Antichrist for deep packet inspection before being sent out to its destination on the internet that's a big problem if you value your privacy but luckily there's a solution oh open w the fully Foss GPL V2 licensed firmware for your router which can not only extend the life of your home router that's no longer getting firmware updates from the manufacturer but it can actually bring new features to it like VPN functionality on the router that's usually only found on higher-end office routers oh and a couple of disclaimers before we begin installing custom firmware is typically going to avoid the warranty on most routers and the open wart firmware does not come with the warranty itself so only proceed with doing this at your own risk and also if your router happens to be using broadcom Wireless drivers then there's a chance that the 5 GHz band isn't going to work you know the wireless 5 GHz might not work or Wireless might just not work at all because broadcom hasn't released any fast drivers and they generally don't support open open source software at all so broadcom you however you can still use other network functions on your router you're just not going to be able to use the Wireless feature if you're using broadcom Wireless drivers and open word on your router uh or alternatively you can install ddw which is mostly open source except for things like its support for the broadcom firmware blobs now to get started once once you've gone to the open w website and read through the information on here which by the way really recommend doing that if you're actually going to flash this firmware to your router don't just follow the instructions in this video make sure that you actually read the uh Wiki a Wiki for your specific device um but anyway once you've done that uh we're going to need to download the appropriate firmware version for your router uh so I really recommend this thing here this is the open word uh firmware selector which I'm going to leave a link to in the description of this video uh but basically you can just type in the make and model of your router so I put in uh Asus rtac 51u which is what I'll be uh using for this demonstration and it brings me to the latest version uh that it's able to install which is 22.03% the option to download the uh kernel which this is what you're going to want if you're first installing open word for the first time just like it says here useful for installation or recovery uh alternatively if you're running open word already then and like you want to upgrade it to a newer version just like you would if you were um you know if you were using the stock firmware on your router but instead of downloading it from the manufacturer you would download this upgrade here um now another option for um getting your firmware is to go to the open word table of hardware and just search for it in here uh so obviously this is a very very long list of devices that are supported um and again you want to read through this to make sure that the device uh actually supports Wireless if that's something that you need to use um and this is also a good resource too if you haven't bought a router already or maybe you're looking to buy a new one you know sometimes people want to have multiple routers in their home to get like whole home coverage uh this is going to be a good place for you to check for that as well to see if the router that you want to buy actually supports open workart now once you've downloaded this kernel image to install open word to your router I recommend if you aren't already to create a wired connection from the computer you're going to use to flash open word you know the one you downloaded the kernel onto to your router okay you can technically do the flashing over a wireless connection but it's not a good idea to do that because it increases the likelihood that some data is going to get lost you know with it going over the air instead of through a wire and that in turn increases the chances that you would brick your router so go ahead and connect to it with ether interet um and then you want to also figure out uh what your gateway address is so uh usually it's going to be like 1 19216811 or 10.0.0 but you can just go into your if config or your IP settings to figure out uh what that is in my case it's um 192168 50.1 because I'm actually connected to multiple routers right now cuz I'm such a cool guy who's got multiple ethernet ports on his uh on his uh desktop so anyway we're going to log into my router all right and then we're going to have to navigate to uh where we would put in our firmware upgrade so the same area where you would do like a regular um you know proprietary firmware upgrade but we're just going to replace it with that kernel that we downloaded so let's see I'm pretty sure it's this here yep all right and then select my open work okay and then we're going to go ahead and upload it all right so as you guys guys got to see firsthand it is very very important to actually follow the instructions on the wiki for your router model uh so I couldn't just flash uh open word the easy way and it looks like for my um Asus AC 51u if you're on Windows you can do this Asus firmware restoration tool crap but I'm a fos Chad so I'm just going to tftp from my Linux box into the router so let's make sure we uh read these instructions carefully so download the openware firmware image okay we got that unplug the power cord from the router and press the reset button with a pin and keep on holding it down okay so we need two hands for this and then plug the power cord back in and wait 10 seconds and release the reset button okay so looks like I've got a flashing slowly flashing power LED so I'm probably in some kind of recovery mode or whatever and uh we got to set the network settings for the router so let's see for um let's see was it yeah it's eth zero for me because said I'm a cool guy with two Nicks all right so ipv4 manual and we'll put in 192168 1.75 for our address 255 255 255 and see 192 168 1 one for our Gateway okay so now we have to tftp into the uh router so we're going to do tftp and um let's see I'm just going to follow the instructions here so set the binary setting first time out 120 and then connect so we'll put in our uh Gateway so [Music] 192168 1.1 and then we're going to put and because I'm in the downloads folder or you know the same folder that I downloaded firmware to I should be able to just type in the name of it okay and hit [Music] enter says the power LED flashes quickly it'ss [Music] [Music] flashing doing something didn't uh really seem like it flashed on the power led oh okay now it is there we [Music] go and then the uh final step of course flashing is successful when the power LED is constantly bu [Music] [Music] okay looks like flashing on my power LED is finished let's see flashing is successful and power LED is constantly lit so let's see if I can't log in to the uh router now so go to 1921 168 1.1 and uh well actually okay there's uh might be a bit of confusion here here let me um let me make sure I'm connecting to the right one okay so I think I was connected to the uh right one the whole time I just want to make sure because I've got multiple uh Nicks and multiple open or routers so I should be able to uh just log right in Yeah by default there's no password set so yeah this is definitely the right one and you go we have successfully installed open wart on my Asus rtac 51u and uh I'm not going to get into all the details right now about what you can do with uh open work because as you can see there's a whole lot of stuff that you can uh do within it so probably end up making couple more follow-up videos about that or you could do the research on your own because there's definitely lots of good information out there it's uh maybe not just packed into a super cool mental Outlaw video uh router password this is one thing I definitely recommend changing because of course as you just saw it has no password set by default if you enjoyed this video please like it and share it to hack the algorithm and check out my merch on my website on based. win and you can save 10% automatically a checkout whenever you pay in Monero XM tomor have a great rest of your day

Channel: Mental Outlaw

Views: 68,811

Keywords: Mental Outlaw, mental, outlaw, based.win, based, open, wrt, openwrt, how to install openwrt on router, router, foss router firmware

Id: B7d8U2_AQYw

Length: 15min 31sec (931 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 13 2023