dd-wrt – Mostly Harmless

August 21, 2010

dd-wrt to the rescue (again)!

My Netgear WNR834B v2 has been showing it’s age and giving me grief lately. After a few hours of network usage, my Netgear would suddenly start rebooting itself and keep doing that every few minutes.

The only thing that would bring it back to life would be to pull the plug, wait a few seconds, and put the plug back in. The last firmware for my device is version 2.1.13 dated May 16th, 2oo8. This doesn’t fill me with confidence that the vendor can solve my problem. I don’t blame Netgear for that; they make money on the sale of hardware and not support.

I use a pair of these WNR834Bs to connect my second floor to my ISP in the basement. It’s strictly for bridging a gap where I am not easily able to run a wire.

So I went to the dd-wrt website and picked out the firmware using their router database tool and put in my model. This lead me to their wiki page to read some instructions, and in less than an hour of playing with settings I had dd-wrt running.

The speed difference is pronounced. It’s not just my imagination, web pages are loading more quickly than before. I don’t think that means the Netgear firmware was defective, I do think that tuning additional options in dd-wrt helped improve the situation.

This is a low cost solution to extending the life of some hardware and keeps me from running cable. So far so good and I’ll just see how it goes.

April 30, 2007

I bricked my WRT54G

Right after I put a post up about how dd-wrt rocks, I bricked my WRT54G v5 by playing around with the nvram settings. “It’s dead, it’s a late WRT54g, it’s passed on.”

Sigh.

Right now I have my buggy WET54GS5 back and running on the second floor. I’ll either shell out $60 for a WRT54GL or I’ll wait for draft-n to settle down and put dd-wrt on that. I’ll need a pair of them, one for the basement and one for the second floor… that could get expensive…

April 24, 2007

dd-wrt rocks

If you have a supported wireless AP or gateway and want to have fun extending it without getting too deep into building software, give dd-wrt a try.

I have a collection of Linksys wireless junk, enough that I should consider becoming a stock holder. When we moved into this house I was thinking of running cables from the basement up to the 2nd floor. But this house does not have a simple means to run cable from the basement to the attic and I really don’t want to punch holes in the walls.

So I setup a Linksys WAP54G in the basement, another WAP54G in the guest room, and a WET54GS5 on my second floor where Lily and my computers are. Eventually I purchased a WRT54G v5 and replaced the WAP54G in the basement. I think I wanted to play with the idea of using the WRT54G as a replacement for my Linux gateway. The old WAP55G got put away on the shelf.

The second floor WET54GS5 was a 5 port switch bridge; it seemed like a good idea at the time. The thing is simple to setup but it spontaneously reboots often and support for it is really non-existent. It’s a dead end product.

The shelved WAP54G only has 8MB of RAM and 2MB FLASH which in the past excluded it from hacking. Now the website www.dd-wrt.com has a replacement firmware v2.3 SP2 micro image which fits and is a stripped down. Using these instructions, I installed the image on the WRT54G v5. It works really well and I’ve replaced the 5 port switch bridge with the WRT54G.

On the WRT54G the WAN connection is now configured as just another LAN port. I configured the device as a “Client Bridge” and connect it to the AP in the basement. At the WRT Wiki is a pretty good description of how to set it up. It’s been running without a hiccup for over two weeks now. My game consoles, the laptops, etc. all work fine.

Tag: dd-wrt (page 1 of 1)

dd-wrt to the rescue (again)!

I bricked my WRT54G

dd-wrt rocks

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Jan Dembowski

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