If you would like to install extra packages on OpenWrt, but you have run out of space on your router’s internal flash memory, then this tutorial is for you. The plan is to copy the OpenWrt’s root filesystem onto an external USB flash drive, and tell the router to switch to that when it boots up. All you need is a standard USB flash drive, a USB capable router running OpenWrt, and about 30 mins.

DD-WRT is a really nice way to free your router. It has a polished web interface, gives you far greater control than most proprietary firmware, and is supported on a large number of devices. I would still recommend it for people who want to take a step up to some more advanced networking, and want a sleek web GUI front-end to do so. Having said that, I just switched to OpenWrt, and love it!

OwnCloud is a free (libre), open source equivalent to DropBox. As well as the program you install on your server, it has free desktop sync clients for Linux, Windows and Mac, and apps for Android and iOS. I’m just going to cover the server side of things for your Pi in this tutorial, because the desktop client can be found in the Ubuntu repos, and the app is on the Play Store. If you want the Android app free of charge, then install it via F-Droid.

Intro

If you’ve read some of the other articles on the site, you may have gathered that I have three RasPis doing useful things around my home:

• Pi #1 is running Raspbmc, an XBMC media centre port for the Raspberry Pi.
• Pi #2 is running this website plus an email server.
• Pi #3 is running the Dropbox replacement OwnCloud.

All three of these ran reasonably quickly out of the box, but because the Pi is such a low powered device, every little performance boost helps. Having said that, this is no small improvement, and the performance gain is instantly apparent.

While tinkering with the settings for my site, I discovered an Apache module called mod_proxy. I was interested in it because I am running two webservers – one for www.samhobbs.co.uk and one for webmail, and I wanted to redirect traffic from one part of the site to the webmail server using ProxyPass. Unfortunately, I was over-enthusiastic in my explorations and made an error: I enabled my server to be used as an open proxy, and attracted thousands and thousands of dodgy requests from around the world. What this meant is that anyone could connect to my server and use it to visit web pages whilst concealing their true identity: the pages visited would only see my IP, not theirs.

What is get_iplayer, and why would you want it?

Get_iplayer is a FOSS program that allows you to download TV and radio from BBC iPlayer. The original developer stopped maintaining it at one point, but since it was licensed using the GPLv3 a few others were able to take over, and it’s still actively maintained. Hooray for free software! You may find it useful if you have a slow internet connection at home that causes iPlayer to stutter, or if you want to download a TV show and watch it later when you’re not connected to the internet (e.g. on a tablet during a long plane journey).