Beef Up Your Wireless Router

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

[straponego]

I haven't gotten around to flashing my old Fon router with it yet, but a friend gave me a demo of his Linksys/Tomato setup... and it is very, very nice indeed. Almost any data you could think of wanting, any control you might want to exercise, presented in a clean, fast AJAX UI: http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato [polarcloud.com]

Finding working hardware for embedded Linux

[delirium of disorder]

I always wanted to run a custom Linux firmware on a Linksys WRT54G, but when I went to several stores, all I saw on the box was the model number, not the version number. Some versions are compatible, others have different hardware and are not, but all the boxes look the same. This is rather strange considering most versions (presumably the free software compatible ones) already run Linux by default! Why don't companies proudly advertise the fact that they run Linux and that it is hackable? Those are useful features! The same goes for zipit [zipitwireless.com] wireless messengers. All run Linux, but the manufacture released a new version that cryptographically locks out the ability to load the device with a custom firmware, so you need to modify the hardware if you want to use these neat and inexpensive little computers as pocket web browsers, ssh clients, ogg players, or other cool things like that. By default they are only useful as an IM device. Why do companies go out of their way to stop their users from improving their own hardware and in the long run, doing free development work for the company? Why don't corporations want essentially unpaid dedicated employees?

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I found Tomato Firmware [polarcloud.com] to have a better web interface than DD-WRT.

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...

[JimBowen]

Yeah, that's the problem with off-the-shelf routers..
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

[Vellmont]

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

[MyDixieWrecked]

Ahhh, I wasn't aware that they were even part of the same project.

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.

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