Spent Sunday afternoon flashing my Linksys WRT54G wireless router with the DD-WRT firmware. Since I use the story of Linksys being compelled to release their router code to satisfy the t&C's of the Open Source license that governed some source code they used, I though I should walk the talk.
DD-WRT is a third party developed firmware released under the terms of the GPL for many ieee802.11a/b/g/h/n wireless routers based on a Broadcom or Atheros chip reference design. It exposes a ton of additional capabilities that are generally not available from the pedestrian firmware released by Linksys (Cisco) and others. Being able to nudge up the transmission power from the paltry 28mw to which the WRT54G defaults was of particular interest.
The DD-WRT wiki is very clear and the forums valuable for those minor questions not covered by the wiki. I must say, the upgrading process was very easy. I did have to hit the forums to figure out how to tweak the settings to optimize for Vuze (P2P client) but overall it was a breeze. Highly recommended. And yes - I'm now transmitting at 100mw - significantly improving bedroom-access while not melting the antennas...
[UPDATE 24 July 2009: See the DD-WRT Site for information about an exploit and to download the latest, patched, version. Also on the site is a firewall rule that blocks any attempt to access sth that has "cgi-bin" in the url.]
No comments:
Post a Comment