DD-WRT - IT'S SO COOL!

For those of you who don't know, DD-WRT is an open source, Linux-based firmware for Broadcom based routers, such as the Linksys WRT54G/GS model, shown below. This firmware is said to turn your "60 dollar router into a 600 dollar router." The features are amazing, and if you don't want all of them, or just a certain subset, there's a build of the firmware with you in mind.

Now, before I go further, there was a reason I discovered this awesome firmware. We had one of these running our home network for a while and it was extremely unstable. Crashed every day, multiple times, and would cut out the wireless radio. We replaced it and this was forgotten in a drawer. 
I recently moved and had issues with the wireless router being too far away from my desktop (it's got a wifi card) and me being too lazy to run a cable that long decided to figure something out. 


On a whim, I decided I would dig out this old router and use it as a switch and extend the too-short 100ft Ethernet cable and use this as just a switch, but then that didn't solve my issue with getting wireless to my laptop. So I did some research and found DD-WRT. 


Once you go through the incredibly picky process of finding the right build of the firmware for the right version of the router and properly resetting and clearing out the router, and disabling certain protocols on your NIC that interfere with the firmware upgrade,... etc. You can finally install your firmware and you're router now has a lot of very cool features. Here's the ones I like the most so far. 

The status page is crazy informative! You can see everything from your Signal to Noise ratio, to your nvram usage on the router, to how much queuing space the router has for packets. You can check the signal quality to wireless clients and you can see real-time graphs of your bandwidth through the connected interfaces on the router.


The configuration on the wireless is great. Currently, I have my router underclocked to 190mHz from 200 to increase stability and keep it just a tad cooler, and I've over driven the power on the signal from 70mW to 80mW because that's where the sweet spot for dB power was (Spent 3 hours tuning it). You can set virtual interfaces, so you could have a virtual, isolated wifi network called guest that had a landing page with ads (it supports ads and redirects for hotspot networks) and you can even set up your DynDns account in the router. For Access Point mode, you can forward DHCP to the main router, and set the WAN port to just be part of the switch, so you can connect  5 hosts to your router.


The cool part - I'm running the "Mini" build that is cut down.


If you want to set up a non-standard home network, or just want to breathe some life into an old linksys router, this is the way to do it. 


Thanks for reading! 


Feel free to comment or leave questions and I'll get back to you.