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."
Also check out Tomato (Score:5, Interesting)
Finding working hardware for embedded Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
I also would love to have a media player that runs Rockbox [rockbox.org], but various hardware is in different stages of rockbox support. It seams like there would be a significant market for products that advertise the fact that they work with free software firmwares right on the box. It's a shame that many industries view "proprietary" as a feature, as something developed uniquely and innovatively by one company. Anything proprietary should instead be suspect of being buggy because there is no way for the public to verify it's security, it probably has poor support for open standards, and it's probably feature limited and uncustomizable.
Re:dd-wrt work just fine (Score:1, Interesting)
Tomato makes full use of AJAX and the features are ideal for the "average joe" -- it is much easier to use than the default firmware on my Buffalo WHR-G54S, while offering more features.
The combo of "more features" plus "easier to use" is pretty rare in software but Tomato succeeds.
Re:Maybe it is just me... (Score:4, Interesting)
It is possible though just to use an old PC as the router, and a lot more flexible. Although if you don't fancy setting up an iptables router manually with Linux, then you might try running DD-WRT on the PC itself. A friend of mine has a tutorial for that over here. [graynetwork.org]
Re:My Routers already does a lot of that stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
my question is, what's the difference between openwrt and dd-wrt?
OpenWRT is the only WRT distribution I've found that doesn't try to provide a single static firmware, but rather takes the approach of desktop/server linux distribution and provides package management. I'm not terribly familiar with DD-WRT, but I don't believe it takes the package management approach.
Personally I believe the package management approach is a better way to go. Don't like the version of -package- OpenWRT has provided? Go find a different one. Want some new feature they aren't providing? Go create one yourself. The UI may not be as polished, but I think the power you gain with package mangement is worth the added pain of having to configure the advanced stuff via command-line and editing files. (The less advanced stuff is all configurable via web interface).
Re:My Routers already does a lot of that stuff (Score:2, Interesting)
The DD-WRT website is very scant on details and only seems to provide a decent explanation of what it is if you already know everything that it does.
I really wish it had a complete list of features on there. After installing it, I tried to figure out (for several hours) how to do snmp monitoring so I could add it to my cacti [cacti.net] graphs only to realize that it had that capability in there already. A simple google search would have shown the same thing, but that info should have been readily available on their site and not hidden away in the forums like it is.
Another really cool thing about dd-wrt is that it does have ssh/telnet for doing manual tweaking, although I wasn't immediately able to figure out how to edit anything since it all seems locked/ there's no available disk space.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)