Connecting to the Interweb - II (2013)

The project for 2013 mostly stemmed from a desire to be able to share both a wifi range extender and the VPN service but, as most projects do, has suffered some scope creep!

The Alfa solution of an AWUS036 + R36 creates a wifi range extender / wireless access point (AP) pair and is used by many cruisers, however it wouldnt do the VPN part. It could have been used, with hindsight, as a WAN input to a domestic router however I chose to use a Ubiquiti Bullet as the range extender. The choice was based on its having an ethernet interface and powered through power-over-ethernet (PoE). I felt a long ethernet cable to be a better solution than either a long USB cable (potential 5v power loss) or a long aerial (signal losses).

The choice of the Bullet was partly based on that device having support from DD-WRT, an open source wireless router firmware project, which also supports OpenVPN. As I subsequently discovered, the developers on that project dont consider either the processor or memory of the Bullet sufficient to run VPN in addition to base function. The Bullet has been reconfigured with Ubiquiti's original firmware as the wifi 'scan' function is easier to use so it is solely used a wifi extender.

So I looked elsewhere for a solution to providing VPN centrally.

Where I ended up was with an ASUS RT-N16, a popular domestic router, which has a reasonable processor and good memory for the price - oh, and a 12v power supply. It has a WAN port so both the Bullet and the Ericsson boxes can be plugged in directly via ethernet. Another facet of this project, as it developed, was that I should be able to plug a mobile dongle into the router and have that provide the mobile ISP connection rather than the Ericsson box. The ASUS has two USB 2.0 ports so should support a dongle with the right firmware. I then tried several variants of firmware, including DD-WRT, before settling on TomatoUSB. Specifically the 'shibby' variant of TomatoUSB for reasons that I will outline later.

Configuring this was relatively straightforward, especially when using the original ASUS firmware as this points you in the right direction for later work with other firmware. Particularily in that the WAN devices need to be on different sub-nets to the AP function in the ASUS. I've used a convention of having the AP sub-net as 192.168.20.xxx and the WAN devices with 192.168.10.xx addresses.

In fact the firmware I'm currently using does an adequate job of connecting through a mobile ISP using a dongle, in my case a Huawei E367. Configuration is straightforward using the Tomato built-in browser interface.

There are a number of guides to configuring various devices to be found through Google. Most useful were the initial ones on setting up the Bullet for travelling use, although mainly aimed at US RV users.