How To Setup DD-WRT on Virtualbox

Maybe you are interested to use/try DD-Wrt for your hotspot or using it for our hotspot billing software, unfortunately but you don’t have a compatible router hardware or don’t have any brave to flash your factory router firmware with DDWRT to avoid any unwanted things.

Actually DD-WRT provides X86/ PC Version for free, that installable on your own PC. The problem is , that it is not in virtualbox compatible image. Therefore you won’t able to install it directly to virtualbox, unless you convert it to virtualbox disk (vdi) image first, with vboxmanage command. But the problem does still exist, you may be able to install it to your virtualbox, but the converted image is read only. It won’t save the changes you have made. Once you reboot the router, you will be losing any changes/settings that you have made. The good news is we have fully functional(read/writeable) ddwrt in Virtualboxdisk image (vdi).

Just do the following steps to get fully working DD-WRT on virtualbox with network setup

1. Download our ddwrt-vdi image compressed file from here
2. Extract the compressed file
3. Create the new virtual machine (OS: Linux, Version: Other linux) and Use existing virtual disk: DDWRT-X86.vdi that we have provided earlier
4. Virtualbox Network settings: adapter 1 attached to Host-Only adapter
5. Go to File > Preferences > Network > Select “VirtualBox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter” > Edit , IPv4 Address: 192.168.1.254 IPv4 Network Mask: 255.255.255.0
6. Use your web browser to access http://192.168.1.1/ username: admin password admin , after that you can setup your WAN Connection to DHCP/Static IP address and configure the router as needed
7. Once you have done configuring the router, you would need to change the network settings in virtualbox : Adapter 1 attached to Bridged adapter (select your WAN ethernet interface card that connected to your ADSL modem/gateway router), Adapter 2 attached to Bridged adapter( Select your LAN ethernet interface card that connected to your Access Point)

Note: The default console login username is root and password admin, You would need to have 2 ethernet cards on the Host PC.

Network Layout:

(ADSL Modem/Gateway router) ——DHCP/Static IP WAN[[DDWRT X86 on virtualBox]] LAN—Wireless AP ——Client

Posted in: DD-wrt, VirtualBox