With a dull title like that, I’ll be suprised if anyone reads this right off the bat! Anyhow - I’ve been having some serious stability issues with my home wireless router – a Linksys WRT54G v6 – and thought I’d share what I ended up doing to solve the problem.
When researching the issue, I came across a number of forum posts which basically said the firmware from Linksys is unstable, and that the best solution was to flash the unit to an open source firmware – DD-WRT, based on OpenWRT (read more about it here). Here is an article about how it came to be that Linksys open sourced the firmware for the router (linux GPL license). And here’s the DD-WRT wiki. At this point I was willing to buy a new router I decided to try this – what the heck! The actual process of switching from the Linksys firmware to the DD-WRT stuff was very simple – and there is a on-line recipe for this from Bitsum Technologies. I have to hand it to these guys – figuring out how to flash a linux OS into a 2Mb router through 3 steps must be complex, and they have really simplified it. It worked on the first try. The only issue I had was getting the router newly flashed DD-WRT v23 SP2 micro router to get an IP address from Comcast via DHCP. The solution is very simple – just have the router copy the MAC address from your PC (Setup –> MAC Address Clone). Seems that Comcast will not dish out an IP to the embedded MAC address that the DD-WRT install ships with. Once installed, you get a new management UI, and some additional features (so I’m told – I’m not enought of a networking guy to tell you exactly what other goodies have been added.)
Since installing this, wireless has been completely stable – so all is well.
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