DD-WRT

So my wireless router finally gave out. Having used Linksys routers exclusively at home for almost 10 years, I decided to replace it with a new one. After scouring the local ads, I ran across a Linksys WRT54GS that was on sale at the local WalMart for $39.99. Cool! Ran down and picked one up and rushed home to hookup the new router so I can get back to net surfing! After getting it set up and configured, I remembered a friend of mine telling me about a great firmware replacement for Linksys routers called DD-WRT. I did a web search and found it at www.dd-wrt.com. First, a little bit about DD-WRT. It started off as a bunch of programmers who took the GPL'd source of Linksys' firmware and made improvements, starting off with allowing radius authentication and a few UI improvements and transformed into a whole platform for supporting hotspot revenue generation. Hmmm... More control over my router, and a way to make some money! Well, after re-thinking how much I really want to open up my wireless to my neighbors, I decided to stick with just more control over my router. So, after about 30 minutes of reading/re-reading the install notes and uploading a couple of firmware images to the router, I was finally up and running. What I ended up with was a router with the following:

- 4 Wired Connections
- Secure 802.11b/g wireless access using WPA and MAC filtering (yes, I know you can sniff MAC addresses and spoof them, but I figured it was one more thing to get in the way of nosy neighbors)
- DHCP for all my clients including static address reservation for key devices (This is REALLY nice for my printer!)
- Local DNS using DNSMASQ (this is also REALLY good for name resolution of DMZ machines since I'm a glutton for punishment and use separate name spaces for each subnet and didn't want to put up a server in the DMZ just for DNS!)
- Better QOS and control over my Vonage phone (my Vonage phone kept leaving a bunch of UDP connections open which over time was flooding my LAN, setting the timeouts lower eliminated a lot of that)
- Neato graphs and reports on traffic usage

Overall, I'm very happy with the FREE firmware upgrade to my router. I'm only disappointed that I got the latest version of Linksys router that doesn't support any of the more fully featured versions of DD-WRT.

Note: Newer versions of Linksys routers only support DD-WRT micro which doesn't include IPv6, builtin PPTP Server, builtin OpenVPN server, SNMP, Samba, and a host of other features!