Update 2014-10-08: If you upgraded to the stable Barrier Breaker 14.07, and Syslog-NG is not available, or if don't want to use Syslog-NG for any other reason, please check our other article on using the built in logging feature of OpenWRT to write the log to a file.

We wrote earlier on OpenWRT on D-Link DIR-835. Now, we need to expand the functionality a bit more.

On OpenWRT, the default logging mechanism is an in-memory circular buffer. The user interface for it is the logread command. The log buffer default size is 16 kB. There are a couple of directives that can be set in the system configuration for OpenWRT, but because of the limited size of flash and the non-permanence of RAM, you need another solution if you want to store logs for anything longer than a day or two.

Syslog-NG

Syslog-NG is a good system logging program that is available for OpenWRT.

If you are using Ubuntu 12.04 on an older computer with a Semperon CPU, you will soon find that Flash is not working and therefore Youtube videos will not work either.

Adobe Flash built with SSE2 flag

This is because Adobe has build the recent Flash versions with the SSE2 flags enabled, yet many Semperons lack this particular flag.

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 6
model : 8
model name : AMD Sempron(tm) 2600+
...

This is a quick how to for installing OpenWRT custom firmware on a D-Link DIR-835 router.

Though these instructions were tested on the DIR-835, they apply to many other router models from Linksys, Netgear, ASUS, and many other brands.

Check if your hardware is supported

Update: 2017-Nov-19: See the last section for automated installation and upgrading, which is now possible.

To read my RSS feeds, I use Tiny Tiny RSS, which worked fine until 21 Feb 2014.

On 22 Feb 2014, Ubuntu pushed Firefox 27, Tiny Tiny RSS stopped working, with a Javascript error. After logging in, there would be a pop up error referring to getCookie and tracing to prototype.js.

To solve this, I went back to the ESR (Extended Support Release). This was quite a few steps, so I am documenting them here.

How often do you reboot your laptop?

Well, for me, I run Linux (Kubuntu 12.04), and I usually do it when a new kernel security update is released. And put it on sleep otherwise.

This means I can go for a month and a half without rebooting.

Here is a recent example, output from the "uptime" command:

14:31:46 up 45 days, 2:10, 7 users, load average: 1.45, 1.29, 1.28