New oleg firmware version

[staticroute]

RT-N16
I also have a WL-500W as wireless ethernet bridge with 2.6, including some oleg opkg packages
I actually noticed wifi improvements for my WL-500W. It's stronger and faster

I'm waiting silently waiting for my RT-N66U to get oleg as well (not trying to rush the devs )

well, RT-N16 is based originally on 2.6 I believe, that's why it works ok, but with wl500gP situation is different, the most stable situation with this router is on 2.4.20 kernel, low CPU load, irq usage etc. But the problem is I can't use it due closed-source wi-fi driver which is only available for 2.6 branch.

I partially solved some issues with SLAB allocator and tuned kernel config a bit, but I think it's still not perfect under load.

For example I'm running few openvpn tunnels on 2.4.20 kernel they were eating 0.20 0.10 maximum load, but on new firmware with 2.6.22.19 0.50,0.35,0.22.

Also there is huge load when you're downloading something from LAN, on default options CPU is reaching 100% load. If I didn't alter kernel config it'd be useless (i can't open any site and can't use anything).

Actually my wl500gP equipped with BCM43222 as I noted before + I flashed WL500W firmware, so it's like yours WL500W.

Regarding opkg I just tried it and I think I'd stick with oleg's optware, just because I'm so used to it and I don't want to break existing packages.

[wpte]

Good news for the people that use OpenVPN!

If you keep an eye out on the changelog of Oleg firmware you might have noticed r4318.
This update finally fixes fastnat to work with applications like OpenVPN. This means everyone should be able to turn on fastnat without any problem!
theMIROn who worked on this issue managed to fix it, and I'd like to thank him for that

For the people who don't know what fastnat is: fastnat is a piece of code to speed up the routing between wan and lan (nat).
Even if you have no super speed internet fastnat will save you some cpu load you can use on a whole lot of other things
So does it affect the OpenVPN performance? YES!

I did a little benchmark and came back with these results:
fastnat on:
down 8.00
up 6.36
fastnat off:
down 7.83
up 6.20
Results from http

So if you update your firmware to r4318 or later you are good to go.
note: this update is only available in the rt-n firmware with linux kernel 2.6.

So how do you check if you have fastnat enabled?

nvram get misc_fastnat_x

This line should produce the answer "1" (without the quotes).
If it doesn't here is how to turn it on:

nvram set misc_fastnat_x=1
nvram commit

Now reboot your router after this and it should work.
If you wish to turn it off again, just replace the 1 by a 0.

[staticroute]

Good news for the people that use OpenVPN!

If you keep an eye out on the changelog of Oleg firmware you might have noticed r4318.
This update finally fixes fastnat to work with applications like OpenVPN. This means everyone should be able to turn on fastnat without any problem!
theMIROn who worked on this issue managed to fix it, and I'd like to thank him for that

For the people who don't know what fastnat is: fastnat is a piece of code to speed up the routing between wan and lan (nat).
Even if you have no super speed internet fastnat will save you some cpu load you can use on a whole lot of other things
So does it affect the OpenVPN performance? YES!

I did a little benchmark and came back with these results:
fastnat on:
down 8.00
up 6.36
fastnat off:
down 7.83
up 6.20
Results from http

So if you update your firmware to r4318 or later you are good to go.

So how do you check if you have fastnat enabled?

nvram get misc_fastnat_x

This line should produce the answer "1" (without the quotes).
If it doesn't here is how to turn it on:

nvram set misc_fastnat_x=1
nvram commit

Now reboot your router after this and it should work.
If you wish to turn it off again, just replace the 1 by a 0.

if i do

nvram set misc_fastnat_x=1
nvram commit

and try to use openvpn everytime I try to connect via openvpn from the NAT router gets a reboot. I have wl500gP on rtn firmware. I believe there is no fast nat support on this router.

[wpte]

if i do

nvram set misc_fastnat_x=1
nvram commit

and try to use openvpn everytime I try to connect via openvpn from the NAT router gets a reboot. I have wl500gP on rtn firmware. I believe there is no fast nat support on this router.

are you on oleg rt-n firmware r4318 or later?

[staticroute]

are you on oleg rt-n firmware r4318 or later?

didn't try yet 4318 i'm on 4298, but will do later.

[wpte]

didn't try yet 4318 i'm on 4298, but will do later.

well... that's sort of the point, the patch was added on r4318

[oldgringo]

didn't try yet 4318 i'm on 4298, but will do later.

You should read wpte's post correctly! Proper functionality is introduced in r4318. I'm on that version and OpenVPN is working smooth like a charm.
Thanks for that, theMIROn.

[theMIROn]

So how do you check if you have fastnat enabled?

nvram get misc_fastnat_x

This line should produce the answer "1" (without the quotes).

actually, if nvram get misc_fastnat_x returns 0, it means fastnat is disabled.
all other values (empty, 1, 2, on, enabled, !!!111, etc) mean it's enabled.
su, the proper way to enable it, if was disabled, is

nvram unset misc_fastnat_x
nvram commit
reboot

[wpte]

actually, if nvram get misc_fastnat_x returns 0, it means fastnat is disabled.
all other values (empty, 1, 2, on, enabled, !!!111, etc) mean it's enabled.
su, the proper way to enable it, if was disabled, is

nvram unset misc_fastnat_x
nvram commit
reboot

That's what I said

So how do you check if you have fastnat enabled?
...
This line should produce the answer "1" (without the quotes).

or am I confused here?

I used set instead of unset just to leave the value stored in nvram.
Do you think I should change that to unset then?

[!gm]

Good news for the people that use OpenVPN!

In general I like this

But I'm not sure how I get into this party mood

Actually my OpenVPN instance is running on the gateway-router.

My WL-500gP is running in access-point mode, so fastnat won't give me any performance benefits, if I would run the OpenVPN Service there right?
What do you think?

[staticroute]

OK, fastnat started working since r4318, no more router reboots when openvpn is used with fastnat option.

There seems to be a speed improvement as well when using fastnat over openvpn.

Thanks for this.

[wpte]

My WL-500gP is running in access-point mode, so fastnat won't give me any performance benefits, if I would run the OpenVPN Service there right?
What do you think?

In AP mode the router works like a switch, so there's no lan-wan routing, just switching which is already fast

[theMIROn]

I used set instead of unset just to leave the value stored in nvram.
Do you think I should change that to unset then?

if unset - default mode (enabled) should be in use.

so fastnat won't give me any performance benefits, if I would run the OpenVPN Service there right?

fastnat will be active if there's any DNAT/SNAT/MASQUERADE targets

[wpte]

I'm playing around with EXT4 since I'm planning on buying a new 3TB harddisk.
My other harddisk is wearing out a bit so I want to replace it before it breaks down

I properly looked into the configuration of the kernel before thinking about going over 3TB.
I've seen UEFI was enabled which should allow the GTP partition system for >2TB disks.
For some reason I could never insmod the EXT4 module though I did insmod the dependencies before trying.
It always reported something about a missing symbol.

I decided to build a firmware with EXT4 build in rather than a module and found out while trying to mount, that one option should be enabled as well.

CONFIG_LBD=y

This will allow Large Block Devices to work. After applying this as well I found that mounting EXT4 worked fine.

[wpte]

Let me bump this

Do you guys think it's a good idea to go for a 3TB EXT4 formatted disk?
I'm willing to build myself a special brew firmware with CONFIG_LBD enabled if necessary.

Also I think flashfs is not working on the current firmware. Is the firmware getting bigger again?