Meet Kenny :-)

Everything on my network is named after a character from South Park, and Kenny seemed like an appropriate name for this little fella because he died many, many horrible deaths along the way to getting this right.

After making all that fuss about missing those big boxes with shiny logos, I decided that Kenny deserved his very own piece of flair. Strangely, no one seems to make OpenWRT badges, so I got him the next best thing - a brushed aluminum Tux badge...

Kenny is a six-year-old Linksys WRT150N home wireless router. This particular model, originally released in 2004, is still available brand new for $99.95 at Amazon or about $40 on eBay for a used one. I managed to scavenge my "dead" Kenny out of the dust bin downstairs at my Dad's house several years ago. In the manner of time-honored tradition, he was then expeditiously transferred to the dust bin downstairs at my house. Ahem.

I didn't have the stomach to perform an autopsy myself. Fortunately, I wasn't the first to wonder what might lie beneath that eerily-familiar deep blue plastic shell:

Photo by Small Net Builder

One the usual Broadcom chipsets, I presume? Wikipedia and Small Net Builder say:

• CPU: Broadcom BCM4704 chip Rev. 9 @ 266 MHz
• 16 MB RAM
• 4 MB NAND Flash
• 10/100 Ethernet Switch: Broadcom BCM5325

Sounds like yet another evolution of the battle-tested WRT54G, right? I thought so too until I flashed the thing with OpenWRT and took a closer look at the boot messages:

root@kenny:~# dmesg | egrep 'Ethernet|switch'
ssb: Core 1 found: Fast Ethernet (cc 0x806, rev 0x06, vendor 0x4243)
ssb: Core 2 found: Fast Ethernet (cc 0x806, rev 0x06, vendor 0x4243)
eth0: Broadcom 44xx/47xx 10/100BaseT Ethernet 00:1d:7e:43:e1:66
eth1: Broadcom 44xx/47xx 10/100BaseT Ethernet 00:88:88:88:00:2a
roboswitch: Probing device eth0: found a 5325! It's a 5350.

What's this? I have TWO physical network interfaces, with TWO different MAC addresses??? And one of them is attached to a programmable, VLAN-enabled switch? (Forget about the wireless for the time being, the proprietary wl-mimo driver it needs doesn't work on 2.6 kernels anyway).

Oh, it's on now. Two NICs means I can replicate packets without creating loops!!

Here's where the fun starts. After a lot of prodding, Kenny now sees his ports like so:

Next time, I'll tell you how I did it, and why this setup works so much better than earlier attempts. Having that second physical NIC dedicated to the port formerly known as "WAN" is what made it possible to turn Kenny into a full frame aggregating multi-port *layer-2* ethernet SPAN device. :-)