A blog plug: I used info I learned here to use a Dell 3040 as a WiFi router

[M0les]

So this is a bit tangential, but I submitted some shell-script patches here a while back when I was fiddling with an out-of-kernel WiFi dongle on a little Dell Wyse 3040 thin client. This led me to the supported in-kernel list and I got myself an mt-7921au dongle to play with. I had some shenanigans messing with virtualisation and recompiling the OpenWrt OS targetting the Atom-Z hardware (Based on Paul Jobson's work), so I wrote-up a series of blog posts about it all. Might be of interest to some here.

• Part 1 - Getting the 3040 to work with another OS other than the inbuilt one
• Part 2 - Running OpenWrt in a VM on the 3040
• Part 3 - Recompiling OpenWrt for the Atom-Z CPU to run on bare metal.

[sio]

Thank you for the writeup! I first seen it via organic Google search on Wyse 3040, and then here.

I'm contemplating an idea of a similar router build based on Wyse 3040 + cheap WiFi module or a cheap POE access point capable of running OpenWRT. I'm leaning in favor of USB module because the prices for APs are rather unreasonable at my location, and maintaining another machine (=OpenWRT AP) just for wireless connectivity is extra work I'm not looking forward to. I'm not sure when/if I'll get around to actually building anything though, free time is very scarce lately.

I enjoyed your article even more because you've happened to pick a Comfast module. They are cheap and are on the plug-and-play list - that's why I too was looking at them.

How is your experience with the router so far? Is that module enough to cover a medium-sized apartment? 10m range you've mentioned is difficult to visualize since there are always some walls in real life and I don't know if there were any at the place where you were taking measurements.

[M0les]

The DIY router is "OK", but not amazing. I get better range and throughput through "normal" purpose-built router hardware with diversity antennas, but this still works pretty well (and is very easily customisable because of the "roll-your-own" OS).
How it performs in a "medium apartment" depends how medium your apartment is :-). However, the router has noticeably less range than either of the purpose-built routers I was comparing it to. The 3040 router works fine for the 3m^2 office I'm working in. The signal doesn't carry much more than 3-4m outside that and I think going through 2 walls is going to severely limit signal to the level where you'll lose connectivity from time to time.

[sio]

Thanks, that puts things into a perspective

[bill888uk]

Thank you for the blog. I am exploring 3040 to run openvpn.

Have you come across this performance bug where a monitor or dummy plug is required?

Otherwise without a connected monitor, I've observed OpenWrt on the 3040 appears to run at degraded performance. I've tested it with your basic 22.03.5 squashfs-efi image, and my own MenuConfig generated 22.03.x squashfs-efi image (for Atom), and the standard x86/64 images from OpenWrt Firmware Selector for 22.03.x.

https://forum.openwrt.org/t/dell-wyse-3040-and-openvpn/181578/14

[M0les]

Yes, I saw that come through the other day and thought it was an interesting head-scratcher. I'm a bit tied-up this week, but I'll put it on the stack of "interesting distractions" to get back to.

If it turns out to be reproducible, I imagine it's some sort of hardware power-saving (e.g. down-clock the CPU when the screen's blank). It'd obviously be better if this could be resolved without resorting to a dummy monitor.