Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[PTR]

Any experience or opinions on using OpenWRT on the BT Home Hub 5a, please? I imagine it must offer considerable possibilities for reporting and security.

See the Kitz thread below which has links showing how to flash openwrt. Sadly, it is way beyond my skill level.

http://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/topic,17160.0.html

[kitz]

You are probably best PMing dmcdonnell to ask him.

I have to issue a warning that this forum takes no responsibility for any contract of exchange or sale of routers, and anything you do is at your own risk. 
 
However, that said dmcdonnell has flashed / hacked many other routers such as the F1000/VMG8324 etc for people who didnt feel competent to do so themselves.   He has also done the odd HG612 for postage and the price of a 'few pints', which is cheaper than some of the extortionate prices charged by some of those on ebay.  There's a few regs on here who have gotten hacked routers via him or asked him to upgrade theirs for them.    I wouldn't normally allow say direct ebay type stuff, but on the other hand I recognise that many people don't feel confident enough to do something like this for themselves and several times people have asked if someone else would do it for them, so I dont mind if you want to sort something out between the two of you which is agreeable to both parties.   

[Dray]

Thanks for that. I had no idea he had such a good reputation

[dmcdonnell]

Any experience or opinions on using OpenWRT on the BT Home Hub 5a, please? I imagine it must offer considerable possibilities for reporting and security.

OpenWRT support for the BTHH5a is fairly recent. They do not supply an OpenWRT image as the device is not considered fully supported right now so you have to build your own. This means you need at least some software development skills.

Development is ongoing with some very capable people involved. See the OpenWRT development archives for Jan, Feb and Mar for more detail, https://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/

Yesterday, for example, saw several recent patches applied to OpenWRT Trunk, see https://dev.openwrt.org/timeline

I am a big fan of having full control of my router. Currently I use the ZyXel VMG8324-B10a, an excellent device but there are very real security concerns about it. This is what attracted me to the BTHH5a along with its excellent spec.

I encourage folk to do it themselves but it is not a trivial exercise. See the photo of the board with the 3 solder pads of interest, Transmit (tx), Receive (rx) and Boot Select Mode 4 (bs). The pin is there to give you an idea of scale.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Hope its okay to necro this thread as its relevant to what I want to post, seems silly to start a fresh as this is basically an update on the current state of this device under OpenWRT 19.07.0 r10860-a3ffeb413b.

Since my lines have been getting slower and someone let slip that you can mess with the downstream SNR on this hardware, I decided to give it a try with latest OpenWRT and -3dB SNR downstream.

My Zen line changed from 66.14Mbit to 73.99Mbit, a 7.85Mbit increase:

Code: [Select]

Chipset: Lantiq™ XWAY™ VRX268
Firmware Version: 5.8.1.8.1.6
API Version: 4.17.18.6
MEI Version: 1.5.17.6
Power Management Mode: L0 - Synchronized
Line State: UP [0x801: showtime_tc_sync]
Line Uptime: 1d 3h 20m 28s
Resyncs: 2
DSLAM/MSAN VID:
XTSE Capabilities: 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x2
Annex: B
Line Mode: G.993.2 (VDSL2)
Profile: 17a
Trellis: D: ON / U: ON
Bitswap: D: ON / U: ON
G.INP: D: Not Enabled / U: Not Enabled
Virtual Noise Support: D: Not Supported / U: Not Supported
Attain Data Rate: 77.096 Mb/s / 23.825 Mb/s
Actual Data Rate: 73.993 Mb/s / 20.000 Mb/s
Impulse Noise Prot: 0.0 sym / 0.0 sym
Interleave Delay: 0.0 ms / 0.0 ms
NFEC: 255 / 255
RFEC: 16 / 16
LSYMB: 19851 / 5410
Interleave Depth: 1 / 1
Interleave Block: 255 / 255
LPATH: 0 / 0
Line Attenuation: 12.9dB / 15.0dB
Signal Attenuation: 12.9dB / 14.9dB
Noise Margin: 3.7dB / 8.5dB
Transmit power: 13.8dBm / 6.1dBm
FECS: 7621 / 108972
ES: 116 / 16942
SES: 0 / 3
LOSS: 0 / 0
UAS: 35 / 35
HEC: 0 / 0
CRC_P: 0 / 0
CRCP_P: 0 / 0
15m Code Violations: 1 / 0
15m FEC Errors: 12 / 0
1d Code Violations: 111 / 99
1d FEC Errors: 6291 / 747
My Plusnet line went from 56.37Mbit to 68.9Mbit, a staggering 12.53Mbit improvement.

Code: [Select]

Chipset: Lantiq™ XWAY™ VRX268
Firmware Version: 5.8.1.8.1.6
API Version: 4.17.18.6
MEI Version: 1.5.17.6
Power Management Mode: L0 - Synchronized
Line State: UP [0x801: showtime_tc_sync]
Line Uptime: 16h 14m 24s
Resyncs: 2
DSLAM/MSAN VID:
XTSE Capabilities: 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x2
Annex: B
Line Mode: G.993.2 (VDSL2)
Profile: 17a
Trellis: D: ON / U: ON
Bitswap: D: ON / U: ON
G.INP: D: Not Enabled / U: Not Enabled
Virtual Noise Support: D: Not Supported / U: Not Supported
Attain Data Rate: 69.012 Mb/s / 20.604 Mb/s
Actual Data Rate: 68.922 Mb/s / 20.000 Mb/s
Impulse Noise Prot: 0.0 sym / 0.0 sym
Interleave Delay: 0.0 ms / 0.0 ms
NFEC: 255 / 255
RFEC: 16 / 16
LSYMB: 18469 / 5410
Interleave Depth: 1 / 1
Interleave Block: 255 / 255
LPATH: 0 / 0
Line Attenuation: 12.2dB / 14.9dB
Signal Attenuation: 12.3dB / 14.7dB
Noise Margin: 3.4dB / 6.0dB
Transmit power: 14.5dBm / 5.5dBm
FECS: 178308 / 251426
ES: 53 / 29261
SES: 0 / 61
LOSS: 0 / 0
UAS: 64 / 64
HEC: 0 / 0
CRC_P: 0 / 0
CRCP_P: 0 / 0
15m Code Violations: 0 / 0
15m FEC Errors: 18 / 0
1d Code Violations: 50 / 48
1d FEC Errors: 158942 / 245

[Alex Atkin UK]

Updated the stats using the ECI modified scripts. I changed them to run from /root/ so they are preserved between OpenWRT updates (by adding /root/ to the sysupgrade saved configuration file) and in case newer OpenWRT has made any changes to them.  I'd rather the stats break than the whole modem subsystem.

[mrk26]

I was testing newest Openwrt but I like the stats from chaos calmer and couldn't get round how to get them work on latest openwrt...

[Alex Atkin UK]

I was testing newest Openwrt but I like the stats from chaos calmer and couldn't get round how to get them work on latest openwrt...

I just looked at the update script on this post and pulled just the files used to get the stats.

Basically dsl_control and lantiq_dsl.sh, which I put into /root/, made them executable and modified to point to each other rather than the OS versions. 
Obviously it relies on the other scripts they depend on remaining compatible with these modified scripts, but it seemed safer than actually modifying the main scripts themselves.

I then created a small script /www/cgi-bin/dsl that calls /root/dsl_control status  when I visit http://routerip/cgi-bin/dsl from a browser.