Transcript

Please excuse any grammatical errors. I used a tool to generate the transcript and haven’t had a chance to read through it yet.

So I recently purchased the router you see on the screen now, the GL.iNet Beryl 7, or the GL-BE3600.

I’d always kind of wondered about the reasons behind having a travel router when traveling, thus the name.

But I came across this article that talked about some of the consumer devices that could be out there. And I always knew there were IoT devices that did some less-than-ideal things. But these Android TV streaming boxes, which, public service announcement, if you have one of these, read this article. It will be linked down below. Consider getting rid of it.

But again, after reading this article, I started to see that there could be some benefit to having another device between my devices and the untrusted network that I’m using, whether that’s a hotel network, a friend’s house, or a coffee shop, something like that.

And before I get too far into it, if you want to skip this part of the video because you’re here to see the instructions on installing OpenWrt on your router, feel free to skip ahead. Check the timestamps below.

Some other benefits, besides the added protection of having a router in between you and the wireless network or whatever network you’re trying to use: let’s say you go to a hotel, and you want to use the hotel Wi-Fi. Typically, those authenticate devices or register them based on MAC address. It can be kind of annoying to sign in every device you brought with you and whoever else is traveling with you.

So instead, what you can do is take this router, sign in using this, and once the router is authenticated, you can then connect all your devices you’re traveling with to the wireless network this is rebroadcasting. And since the travel router is already authenticated, that single device is using the hotel Wi-Fi as the uplink. Now all your devices connected to it are going to be good to go without re-registering.

Another benefit is that you can configure a VPN on the travel router. So let’s say you have IVPN. You configure that on the Beryl 7. Now any device that connects to the wireless network that it’s broadcasting out gets that same VPN connection protection without having to configure IVPN on every one of your devices.

I actually do that at my house with OPNsense. I have IVPN configured on there. All my traffic is configured to use that as the exit. So now it’s pretty cool that I can do that when I’m on the road instead of having the client installed on all my devices.

There are also a bunch of other things you can do with this. Again, it’s going to be using OpenWrt, but those are a couple of the main things.

So when I was traveling last month, I ended up using the stock firmware on this because OpenWrt was not available for it yet. They just released it, I think, about a week or two ago, so now I’m ready to get that installed on here.

Let’s begin that.

So again, all links will be available down below, so you can follow along if you’re trying to get this installed on your device. But if we go to the main page, scroll down to the installation section. The first step is to download the latest sysupgrade image for the GL-BE3600.

So let’s open the firmware selector. You should see a page like this. Confirm the model number there matches yours. We need to download the sysupgrade image. Select that, and it should go to your downloads folder or wherever your downloads are configured to go.

Let’s go back to the installation instructions. Use an Ethernet cable to connect to one of the router’s LAN ports. The reason you need to use a LAN cable is that by default, OpenWrt disables the Wi-Fi on the router for security reasons. So if you don’t have a LAN cable, you won’t be able to connect to it after the installation.

So if you need to use a dongle or something like that for an Ethernet port on your device, go ahead and get that, and then plug it into your laptop or computer. So I just plugged mine into my laptop.

So the next step is to browse to the GL.iNet web interface. The default IP is 192.168.8.1. If you haven’t logged into your device yet, then go ahead and try to access that IP address. If you’ve already set it up, then go to whatever you configured.

In my case, I haven’t configured it yet, so let’s just go there. If you’ve never set up your device before, go ahead through the initial setup. I’m just going to leave this set to the default because these settings will get overwritten shortly when we flash the new firmware.

Go back to the instructions. Now that we’re logged in, go to the upgrade page and drag in your downloaded sysupgrade image. When prompted, select do not keep configuration.

So let’s go here to System, Upgrade, Firmware, Local Upgrade. Select a file to upload, or drag it here. I’m going to drag it there. Again, it should be in your downloads or wherever you configured your download to go.

So you should have the OpenWrt sysupgrade image. We have GL-BE3600, which does match the model number of the Beryl 7. This version number might change if you’re watching this in the future, as versions do get upgraded.

So let’s drag it there. Upload successful. This is not official release firmware. Okay, let’s just walk through it then. There are no other instructions on the main page.

Verification result: pass. Keep settings. We don’t want to, so we’ll leave this disabled, and then click install. This might take a few minutes, so we’re just going to let this sit. Don’t touch anything. Just let it flash. Let it do its thing, and it should come back once it’s completed.

The page refreshed, but it went back to 192.168.8.1. If we go back to the instructions, the OpenWrt default IP address is 192.168.1.1, so we will have to go there in our browser.

1.1. Continue to site. And here we are. This looks like the OpenWrt interface. We can see on the tab that it is.

After flashing, OpenWrt can be configured as described in the quick start guide. Let’s open that up. I’m connected to the wireless router, or I’m connected to the Beryl 7, so I don’t have internet access currently.

I’m guessing the password is password. Okay, so it was online. For firmware upgrades, yes. Enable checking configured changes, yes. It’s going to check for upgrades. Save and apply.

Anyways, that’s OpenWrt and how to get it installed on the Beryl 7. I’m not going to go through the setup at this point, but I might make a video on it in the future. And if you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave those down below, and I’ll see you in the next one.