Sometimes tech just decides to betray you all at once.

First, my main router—a Mikrotik hAP ax^2^ —finally gave up the ghost. It had been acting weird for a while, but last week it just died on me. To make things worse, my mini toy server (an old Poco F1 running postmarketOS with Docker, hosting AdGuardHome, Home Assistant, OpenWebUI, PhotoPrism, and more) also gave up earlier this month, lol, very good start for a new year.

Honestly? I didn’t feel like buying new gear. Too lazy to research. Too lazy to care.

For a quick (and totally unsafe) fix, I just hooked up my ISP modem directly to my Proxmox box and fired up a RouterOS demo VM as a temporary router. Yes, I know—I’m basically asking for trouble, but sometimes laziness wins.

The Comeback Kid: Linksys WRT1900ACS

Then yesterday, while digging through my box of old electronics, I found my ancient Linksys WRT1900ACS. I plugged it in, and surprise—it powered on just fine. Not dead yet!

So I thought: why not give this old beast a second chance?

The plan is to install OpenWrt on it, with a USB drive hooked up using Extroot for extra storage. But before I switch to Extroot, I need to make sure everything essential is set up on the internal storage (NAND) first. Because if the USB dies later and OpenWrt falls back to NAND, I don’t want to end up completely offline again. I hope the usb drive is the first one to die.

My Setup Plan Before Extroot

To avoid future headaches, here’s the checklist I came up with before touching Extroot:

  • ✅ Install and configure PPPoE for WAN access
  • ✅ Replace default Dropbear with OpenSSH, just for easier reason tbh.
  • ✅ Set up routing rules, VLANs, and firewall rules
  • ✅ Harden the system:
    • Change the root password
    • Add a second non-root user
    • Remove LuCI (the web interface) and disable the webserver, mostly using remote SSH
  • ✅ Install and configure:
    • AdGuardHome
    • Tailscale for remote access, yes, even if I’m home sitting on the toilet.

That way, if the USB fails (which we all know it eventually will), at least the core router functionality still works without it. Again hope that usb drive gives up first, so I can force myself to reconsider every decision I made.

Why Bother?

I know I could just buy a new router or even leave the RouterOS in place a bit longer. But there’s something satisfying about reusing old hardware and making it work against the odds.

Plus, I’m lazy, but I’m not that lazy.

Note to self: Please consider searching for a replacement, i know you want a new shiny toy. Dude, I know you inside out