Gargoyle questions

[chigo58]

I've upgraded two 1043ND's (v1.7) to 1.5.10 and hardwired them. They simply act as AP's with two distinct SSID's and they work flawlessly with the WAN connection disabled. The main gateway router is my actual ISP's modem (ST546) which does DNS, DHCP and an external PPPoE connection.

A couple of questions if I may:

Web Usage: I've turned this on and switched it down to 100 entries, yet I don't see web usage statistics. Is this normal behaviour in my configuration?

USB Storage: Is it possible to connect and mount a USB drive which is formatted in Mac OS Extended (Journaled - HFS+) format?

Is there a recommended way to setting one SSID on both 1043ND's to avoid having to switch networks when I move from one side of the house to the other? Currently I manually switch from one wireless network to another when I move up and down the house.

Thank you.

[BashfulBladder]

1. Web Usage: I am going to guess: it needs either DHCP or a WAN connection. As your Gargoyle routers do not have a WAN connection, I am going to say WAN. I'll note that I have 2 routers, one as a WAN gateway, another as basically an Access Point & switch. The gateway router has web usage; the 2nd router does not.

2. USB Storage using HFS+. Only if you compile your own firmware. I used to use a HFS+ USB flash drive. You'll need the HFS+ kernel extension + some changes to the usb_storage script that Gargoyle uses. Except the linux support doesn't work with journaled drives - you have to use Disk Utility.app to disable journaling. And HFS+ devices sometimes mount read-only if you don't dismount it when you upgrade or the power is pulled (I think I was safe on rebooting). You have to pull the drive & connect to a real Mac to repair the device before the router will be able to write to the device again.

3. Roaming: You use the same SSID/password on both routers. Use different channels, preferring non-overlapping channels.

[chigo58]

Hi BashfulBladder, thanks for your replies. Most useful

Update: As recommended I tried setting the same SSID on the routers on different channels quite apart from each other. Devices kept losing the wifi connection and reconnecting.. so i reverted to two different SSID's.

My next feat is to create the plugin-wifi-survey.ipk package for the 1043ND as this will be very useful for me to choose the right channel.

Update2: Following BashfulBladder's instructions i attempted the compilation of gargoyle on a fully compliant debian VM. didn't really work out for me for a couple of reasons.

1) compile time in virtualbox takes a reaaalllyyy long time (running on a 2009 mbp)
2) i underestimated the space i needed to compile for the ar71xx target platform. apparently 10G is not enough

right now, I'm getting by using an Android wifi scanner app next to my routers - and i think i'll rest my case. That said, if some good soul has an ipk for wifi-survey I'd be grateful if he could share <smug smily>