Jan 03 2006

Hacking Linksys firmware

Published by Eric at 9:46 pm under ISP

Most computer users buy the least expensive wireless router they can find, plug it in, never configure it, and they’re perfectly happy.

I, on the other hand, have more discerning needs. Belkin is evil so I’ve always paid a few more pesos and gone with a Linksys. The WRT54G is probably one of the best for configurability but the stock firmware lacks a number of useful features.

Since Linksys built the WRT54 series on an embedded Linux platform, we’ve got opportunities to rebuild it, make it better, faster. Just like the Bionic Man.

I’ve used the Sveasoft and DD-RT firmware with different results but one rises to the top in terms of reliability.

Creative software developers took the GPL’ed Linux source code on the Linksys router and modified it to include additional Linux functionality. I’m most interested in security and firewall rules so I tried one of these “hacked” firmware upgrades. Enter Sveasoft.

I’ve been running Sveasoft firmware for over a year. Nice features but with a tragic flaw: frequent loss of wireless signal. It doesn’t matter the firmware version because after a period of two weeks (in rare cases, hours) the access point will just vanish. Power off and on and problem fixed.

My wife was at home on bed-rest, noodling with a laptop, and got really tired of running into the office and rebooting the router. When she wasn’t doing it, I was.

I took to Google in search of a replacement “hacked” firmware. Enter DD-WRT.

The DD-WRT firmware has a cleaner web interface, more options, and most importantly: reliable. The access point doesn’t drop off the face of the planet. In the few months I’ve been running DD-WRT I’ve had maybe one or two instances where a reboot was required. I lost count of the Sveasoft reboots.

Perhaps my hardware is at fault but it’s tough to say when one product works reliably and the other doesn’t. Add to that Sveasoft’s $20/year for support and DD-WRT’s $0 fee and I’m left scratching my head where my $20 went.

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