OpenWrt in Incus

You don’t need a router with a Web GUI, but it’s convenient and Incus makes it easy by providing a base image you can spin up in a few seconds. This will already contain the incus-agent for integration with incus management commands.

Preparation

Incus provides a private network incusbr0 that handles the basics. But to to manage port forwarding, DNS and the like, you’ll need another. We created such a network when configuring Incus. Refer to that if you haven’t created one yet.

Installation

Just create a new instance and search for OpenWRT. The newest stable (non RC or snapshot) version is preferred. When creating, add a second network interface and change the name to eth1 before starting. Make sure both are connected to the bridge or vlan network you added when configuring Incus.

Configuration

Add LAN Interface

The first step is to get access. Use the Incus Web interface to inter the console and edit the config files.

# Configure the LAN interface
vi /etc/config/network

# Add this after the WAN entries
config interface 'lan'
    option device 'eth1'
    option proto 'static'
    option ipaddr '192.168.10.1'
    option netmask '255.255.255.0'

Then restart the network service to enable

/etc/init.d/network restart

Access The Web Interface

You need to be on the ‘inside’ to access the web interface. Since this is an overlay network where both interfaces are connected to the same LAN, you can simply change your workstation’s IP address manually to an address in that space.

If that’s not possible, you can stop the firewall service /etc/init.d/network restart to connect from the WAN side.

Access the web interface at http://192.168.10.1 and login as root (no password). Answer yes if prompted about checking for updates, and click Network -> Interfaces and answer yes again when prompted to allow it to update network names. Save and apply after accepting.

Notes

You may find that you’re running a release candidate despite not picking one. The image builds are not always tagged with ‘RC’ so you may check the latest actual release before grabbing one.

https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/releases/latest