OpenWRT

UCI

The Unified Configuration Interface (UCI)

The files with the actual config are under /etc/config. These files have a consistent syntax and a set of uci commands that can be used to modify them.

The data in these files is used to write/update whatever tool-specific config files the various tools expect.

You can edit the files manually, or use uci set and other commands to change them.

When done, use uci commit to apply the updated uci config files to the individual unix tools’ own config files. Then either reboot, or figure out how to restart the affected services, e.g. /etc/init.d/uhttpd restart to restart the uhhtpd web server.

There’s a lot more info about specific uci commands at the link above.

Irqbalance

irqbalance package

Irqbalance spreads the work of handling network traffic across all of a modern processor’s cores, which is often necessary these days to manage gigabit speeds.

Install the package. Edit /etc/config/irqbalance to enable it. Reboot.

(Per this forum post, it’s no longer necessary in 21.02 to manually start the irqbalance program from /etc/rc.local or similar.)

DDNS

Dynamic DNS with Cloudflare

  • Create A & AAAA records on cloudflare with dummy IP addresses. (Don’t use real addresses. Now you can see when your DDNS works and sets them correctly.)

  • Get an API token (not an API key, you want a “token”) by going to the user API tokens page. Give the new token access to edit the zone data for your domain.

  • On OpenWRT, install “ddns-scripts ddns-scripts-cloudflare ddns-scripts-services luci-apps-ddns”

  • You should now have a “Services” item on the main OpenWRT Luci menu, but I didn’t right away. I reloaded, logged out and in, restarted uhttpd, and somehow later I did have the Services item.

  • Go to Services/Dynamic DNS.

  • You’re going to end up with two services at the bottom of the page, for IPv4 and IPv6.

  • Create or edit the ipv4 one:

Enabled

Check this box

Lookup Hostname

OpenWRT will try to look up this hostname in DNS and if the resulting IP address is different from your current WAN address, will try to update it using DDNS. So put in the fqdn of the domain you’re trying to do DDNS with.

IP address version

“IPv4-Address”

DDNS Service provider

“cloudflare.com-v4”. After changing this, there will be a button to change the service. Click it before continuing.

Domain

“name@domain” - WEIRDNESS for cloudflare. “domain” should be the domain part of the fqdn you’re trying to set, and “name” the specific beginning of the fqdn. E.g. if you’re trying to set up “www.example.com”, you would enter “www@example.com” here for some reason.

Username

“Bearer”

Password

Enter your API token.

Use HTTP secure

Check this

Path to CA-Certificate

/etc/ssl/certs

  • Save

  • Save & Apply

  • Reload the service

  • Hopefully things will work. If not, click “Edit” on the service, go to the “Log File Viewer” tab, click the “Read / Reread log file” button, scroll to the end, and see if you can figure out from the error messages what is wrong.

  • Now do IPv6 about the same way, except set “IP address version” to “IPv6-Address”.

  • I also had to make a change under the “Advanced Settings” tab:

IP address source

Interface

Interface

eth1

Otherwise OpenWRT, from the error messages, seemed to fail to figure out its own IPv6 address.

Port Forwarding

Suppose you want HTTP requests for port 80 arriving at your home IP address to be handled by a system behind your router. You want to forward port 80 TCP to that system.

  • Go to Network/Firewall.

  • Go to the Port Forwards tab.

  • Click Add.

  • Fill in the form:

Name

Something to remind you why this is being forwarded.

Protocol

TCP

External port

80

Destination zone

lan

Internal IP address

IP address of the internal system that should handle the reuest

Internal port

Can leave blank and it’ll go to the same port on the internal system. Or enter a different port number to send the request to that port.