I recently acquired an old Aruba AP-105. Unlike the closely related IAP-105, the AP-105 is completely useless without an Aruba controller. Luckily however, with some effort, the device can be flashed with OpenWRT. With even more luck, I even got a colleague to do the hard work of flashing U-boot to the onboard SPI for me.

I previously wrote about connecting a rotary-style phone to a VoIP-based telephony setup. In the post, I described using a Fritz!Box 7170 as an ATA because of its support for both SIP and pulse dialling. Although it works very well as an ATA, the device is quite dated and does not offer much functionality other than a Fast Ethernet switch. While it also has a built-in modem and WiFi, it only supports ADSL2+ and 802.

I recently set up an OpenWRT device as a modem on a KPN DSL connection. Fittingly, the device running OpenWRT is a KPN Experiabox V8 which KPN provided their subscribers with up until a couple of years ago. While the device is quite crippled when running the stock firmware, OpenWRT transforms the device into a quite capable modem and router. Having configured the appropriate credentials (user: MA-CA-DD-RE-SS@internet pass: kpn), the PPPoE connection came up immediately, automagically including DHCPv6-PD.