Alternative firmware for Linksys WRT54G router

Anthony Drewery — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 10:04:18 +0000

I use a Linksys WRT54G router (pronounced ‘rooter’ here in Blighty) on my home network. Lately I’ve been having issues with poor Internet speeds and the router becoming unavailable, both of which are usually fixed by a reboot. I suspected it was due to my use of Bittorrent and some Googling seemed to confirm this. First I configured Azureus (my Bittorrent client of choice) to optimise my download speeds. I then looked at ways to optimise my router and to configure some Quality of Service options. This led me to some posts that suggested I would be better served by replacing the default router firmware. I had heard this was possible but had never really given it much thought. It wasn’t something I was interested in doing ‘just because I could’. However, I headed over to http://www.linksysinfo.org to see what it was all about. Using their comparison guide I decided to try DD-WRT. Some of the points that attracted me were:

A reboot button on the web interface (the Linksys firmware doesn’t have this).
Scheduled reboots (just in case I continue to have problems).
A ‘mini’ version of the firmware is available without all the bells and whistles. They have a standard version as well as VPN and VOIP versions if I want more functionality in the future.
It supports DDNS.
It’s free.

There’s a whole bunch of other features and functionality but it’s a little over my head. They’re aimed more at people like my friend and Linux weenie Ben Stokes. Installation was well documented and very straight-forward. The basic process I followed was this:

Connected via Ethernet (don’t try this over WiFi!)
Noted down my existing settings.
Backed up my existing config.
Reset the unit to factory defaults
Updated the firmware via the router web interface.
Reset to factory defaults.
Updated configuration with my settings.

The only other changes I made were to the IP Filter settings as recommended in a post that I didn’t bookmark. I changed the Max Ports to 4096 and the TCP & UDP Timeouts to 120. So far, so good but I’ll need to run it for a week or so to see if it has really improved things. [tags]Azureus, Bittorrent, Linksys, Router, WRT54G[/tags]

Ant Drewery » WRT54G

Alternative firmware for Linksys WRT54G router