Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:  
Summary: Not a technical manual.
Comment: "For those who want to make the most out of their WRT54G you can learn how to port code and develop your own software for the OpenWRT operating system."
"Full coverage on embedded device development using the WRT54G and OpenWRT"
Unfortunately due to publication deadlines, much of the technical content of the book was dropped; it nolonger contains the chapters referenced in the above Amazon description, instead it focuses on giving brief reviews of the various firmwares available, along with hardware and software hacks. While it offers a good overview, the book falls short in technical depth and accuracy.
There are several places in the book where the information is either outdated or innacurate. Some examples -
OpenWrt should not be upgraded through the use of the "ipkg upgrade"; OpenWrt uses a filesystem overlay where the filesystem (squashfs) is readonly but appears writable by redirecting write access to another filesystem (jffs2). Attempting to upgrade will result in filesystem duplication; there are several warnings on the OpenWrt site regarding this.
The failsafe feaure is not new to OpenWrt's RC5 release; there has always been a failsafe proceeedure, but the instructions prior to the RC5 release were slightly different; failsafe was redesigned in RC5 to make it easier to access.
The example of blackholing advertisers through the use of dns using dnsmasq suggests rewriting the dnsmasq.conf; while the example does work, it creates a mess out of the configuration and involves many unnecessary steps. The same task could be acomplished much more easily by simply adding the hostnames to the /etc/hosts file.
The nvram-clean script does not actually reset the nvram configuration to defaults as described. The nvram-clean script only has a handful of known superfluous variables to remove; these are variables created by other firmwares that are nolonger required. It will not set any variables to their defaults; the defaults are device specific and setting them incorrectly would result in an unbootable device.
Customer Rating:
Summary: WRT54G Encylopedia!
Comment: Wow I got my book in a week ago and read the entire thing in three nights. It was everything I was expecting! I am now on the hunt for some moderate priced WRT54G's.
Presently I have a WRT54G ver.3 running dd-wrt and after reading this book plan on moving to Openwrt. This really is a must have for anybody that enjoys pushing your equipment to the limit or just tinkering...Yes you can find a lot of this information on your own on the net, But Larry and Paul have done a great job bringing it all together and giving you a lot thought points along the way and made a nice point to make the code sections availble for download saving from time consuming typing mistakes.
My favorite sections are building a pen-testing WRT54g and the hardware hacking section.
All ready adding a 2gig sd card to mine and dual serial ports. And there website for the book [...] is steadily being updated with new and information constantly. Just recently added diseccting the WRT54g ver.8. Thanks guys and Great job.
|
|
|
