David Russell

A few days ago, I updated the firmware on my Linksys WRT54G (v3) to DD-WRT. The last time I played around with some alternative firmware options for my wireless router was a few years ago. At that time, it was certainly fun to modify the router in this way, but it didn’t really bring a ton of functionality (or form for that matter). Sure, there were a few nice upgrades, but it wasn’t exactly revolutionary.

After I recently moved my rig down into the living room, taking the router with me, I decided to look in on some of the firmware projects I remembered from a some time ago. DD-WRT was at the top of the list to check out, so I started there. And I guess you could say, I finished there! Once I upgraded my router’s firmware from default to the latest firmware from Linksys for my specific router, I installed the “mini” version of DD-WRT (version 23, service pack 2) and then upgraded again to the standard version. This is the process outlined for my router in the documentation. Speaking of docs, it appears some of the information and install guides on the DD-WRT site may need a little cleanup following the recent release of version 24 of the DD-WRT firmware.

Regardless of the lack of timeliness in the docs, I am very much impressed with DD-WRT. In fact, it’s hard to believe the strides this project has made over the last couple of years. It’s proof positive that there is a great community and solid development team driving this software to be great.

DD-WRT converts a $50 consumer-grade router into a very powerful and ultra-configurable device. Here are a few features of DD-WRT:

• Excellent encryption and authentication support
• Transmit power adjustment (boost wireless signal)
• Excellent QoS options
• Improved dynamic DNS support
• VLANs
• Hotspot Portals
• Kaid (for gaming)
• OpenVPN (if you snag the VPN version)
• RFlow
• Samba file system
• SSH server and client

And that’s just a start! Many of the features in DD-WRT even improve on the stock features in the Linksys firmware. Visit the comprehensive list of features for more information.

One caveat for my installation was the need to disable STP. Since my current ISP is Comcast, I modified the STP setting to reflect that. To be honest, I had no idea what this was all about. So I pulled an article from their wiki to get a little explanation.

If you have a wireless router that you are looking for more performance and reliability from, I’d highly recommend adding DD-WRT to your list of considerations.

DD-WRT

Tagged: dd-wrt, linksys, firmware, router, network