Overview of OpenWRT

1

I’m trying to get an overview of what I would need to run Ziti on my wimpy OpenWRT device so I can decide if it’s worth the effort. It would be cool to have Ziti running on my homelab gateway so I don’t need a separate VM straddling the VLANs.

I’m coming at this as an OpenWRT user that has successfully avoided building the firmware up to this point. GitHub - openziti/ziti-openwrt: Ziti package feed for OpenWRT suggests I need to build-in the Ziti “feed” to the OpenWRT firmware. That’s a new concept to me. My main question is whether building the firmware is my only option?

Most of the threads I’ve read about Ziti on OpenWRT, including this NetFoundry article about IoT networking that covers OpenWRT, mention “Teltonika” a bunch of times. There doesn’t seem to be a single mention of OpenWRT that doesn’t also also mention Teltonika. I gather Teltonika is a hardware device and an SDK, so do I need the Teltonika SDK to build Ziti for my non-Teltonika device running OpenWRT?

DETAILS

BusyBox v1.35.0 (2023-01-03 00:24:21 UTC) built-in shell (ash)

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          |__| W I R E L E S S   F R E E D O M
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 OpenWrt 22.03.3, r20028-43d71ad93e
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root@hella:~# uname -a
Linux hella 5.10.161 #0 Tue Jan 3 00:24:21 2023 mips GNU/Linux

root@hella:~# cat /etc/os-release 
NAME="OpenWrt"
VERSION="22.03.3"
ID="openwrt"
ID_LIKE="lede openwrt"
PRETTY_NAME="OpenWrt 22.03.3"
VERSION_ID="22.03.3"
HOME_URL="https://openwrt.org/"
BUG_URL="https://bugs.openwrt.org/"
SUPPORT_URL="https://forum.openwrt.org/"
BUILD_ID="r20028-43d71ad93e"
OPENWRT_BOARD="ath79/generic"
OPENWRT_ARCH="mips_24kc"
OPENWRT_TAINTS=""
OPENWRT_DEVICE_MANUFACTURER="OpenWrt"
OPENWRT_DEVICE_MANUFACTURER_URL="https://openwrt.org/"
OPENWRT_DEVICE_PRODUCT="Generic"
OPENWRT_DEVICE_REVISION="v0"
OPENWRT_RELEASE="OpenWrt 22.03.3 r20028-43d71ad93e"
2

Hey @qrkourier ! I built a whole automation around just this. I even have it in a test repo to make it silly simple. Ping me tomorrow and I’ll show you!

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3

Prereading :slight_smile:

5

Thanks for the assist, @NicFragale! My OpenWRT device now has a Ziti identity and hosts the Ziti services that I need to access the lab network.

I ran Nic’s builder script on Ubuntu to cross-compile the MIPS architecture binary and copied that over to my router. Then I ran Nic’s installer script to set up the system service.

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6

I made a GH issue to centralize ideas about the idealized Ziti install experience for OpenWRT.

1 Like