Beef Up Your Wireless Router 189
Doctor High writes "Josh Kuo's article Beef Up Your Wireless Router talks about the OpenWRT embedded Linux distro for the the Linksys WRT series wireless routers (and more). The article lays out some of the amazing things you can do with your Linux-enabled wireless router such as using it as a VoIP gateway, a wireless hotspot, or even an encrypted layer 2 tunnel endpoint for remote troubleshooting."
Maybe it is just me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Personal experience with "OpenWRT" (Score:3, Insightful)
What's really needed is wireless router for desktop computers instead of attempts to reverse engineer Linksys routers just for the sake of being embedded.
Re:Stay the hell away from Linksys!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ATTN: SWITCHEURS! (Score:5, Insightful)
Congratulations on not being a geek, I guess
Re:Personal experience with "OpenWRT" (Score:3, Insightful)
Regards,
Ross
Re:Maybe it is just me... (Score:2, Insightful)
As long as you don't mind consuming vastly more electricity than you need to, it is a little more flexible.
Re:Bittorent (IP Connections) (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're getting a Linksys router you'll want the WRT54gL because that's the model that still runs Linux and has enough RAM and flash to use the full feature set of the alternative firmwares. As for running multiple security setups, I don't think even open firmwares can do that on a single router, so you'd need two. There are features that let you run as a hotspot. I'm not an expert on that so I'm not sure if you can run a single router as both a regular router and a public hotspot. It could certainly be done with two separate routers. Just make sure you run the two routers on widely spaced channels if they are in close proximity, like channel 1 and 11.
Having them on two separate networks is easy. Just leave the LAN IP of one router at the default of 192.168.1.1 and set the other one to use 192.168.2.1 with DHCP on and a gateway address of 192.168.1.1 (subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 on both routers). Any clients that connect to the "insecure router" will get an address on a different subnet.
Oh, and make sure you've turned on the connection encryption features of your BitTorrent client, that can help get around ISP bandwidth throttling, if that's a problem with your ISP.
Re:Linux newbie friendly? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Maybe it is just me... (Score:3, Insightful)
But you're right... people pumping up their output power has the potential to piss off some people, and piss enough of them off, and they'll come visit you..
Besides, if I want to use WiFi outside my yard, I can just use the 7 unencrypted spots near me.