Is anyone refurbishing wireless routers?

[Charles M]

We're thinking about refurbishing wireless routers in an effort to help people a little better with their Internet. Until this point we're resisted selling wireless routers to all but the most experienced people, but we were considering selling routers we can support by only selling ones with OpenWRT on them. Here are some of the thoughts on it:

Abstract

We want to be able to assist people to a greater degree with all their computer problems, including their Internet access. We get lots of people with questions about wireless Internet, but answering wireless Internet questions can be challenging because of the variety of wireless routers available on the market. Guiding someone through setting up a router can be challenging because of the number of different interfaces available for different routers. Security is also a concern when implementing a new router. If people deploy routers with old firmware they may leave themselves open to known exploits.

To combat these problems we’re thinking of only keeping routers that run OpenWRT open source firmware. Using OpenWRT simplifies the support process because we only have to know 1 interface. It also ensures that we’re firmware that’s likely to be more secure than the stock firmware. Using OpenWRT also makes it easier to write Internet setup documentation.

Challenges

Getting enough routers that are compatible with OpenWRT

Flashing routers with OpenWRT can be a bit tricky because the process can be slightly different for each router.

How do we test flashed routers without a spare Internet connection? We cannot use our existing connection since it would disrupt other parts of the organization.

Answers

So far about 40% of our small sample of wireless routers are compatible with OpenWRT. Right now we’re not really selling routers so 40% is much better than 5-10%.

We’ve set up a netbook for flashing routers. We’ll connect the netbook to our existing WLAN connection in order to download the proper OpenWRT firmware for each router. We then disconnect the netbook from the WLAN and flash the router with the OpenWRT firmware.

To test the routers we might look to the network testing tools in Phoronix-Test-Suite which we can install on the Xubuntu-based netbook.

Cheers,

Charles

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Charles McColm, Author: Instant XBMC,
Columnist: Full Circle Magazine,
Project Manager: The Working Centre Computer Recycling Project
Web: http://www.theworkingcentre.org/cr/
Blog: http://www.charlesmccolm.com/
Twitter/Identica/Google+: @chaslinux

[Ryan]

Our org has been offering tested networking equipment forever. It's not really a major catagory...how many groups need multiple 48 port rack mount switchs in most cases but it is a nice add on that everyone needs.

Ryan Mc.

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[Jim Smith]

We had offered WiFi routers for several years after fulling testing them and they were offered at a very low price.  However, we sold very few of them because most of our clients got their internet through one of the major providers and the routers that they provided already had WiFi built into them.  So we stopped offering them last fall.

Jim Smith

Director

Phoenix Computers

www.PhoenixComputers.info