Which WRT?

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

I've bought myself a new router in advance of my broadband going to 20 mbit. I made sure it was one of the embedded linux based routers (Buffalo WHR-G54S), and thus capable of loading any of the third party OSes.

Tomato seems to be popular and but a little slow. DD-WRT seems to have a lot of features, but hasn't yet made it to a stable 2.4. Open-WRT just released Kamikaze, but that still seems to have some issues to be cleared up (Broadcom not working fully on the 2.6). There's a lot of other alternative releases too.

Which WRT does everyone like, and why?

 

[stevem]

After playing with a number of ports a while ago I settled on DD-WRT for a WRT54GS v2.0. Fairly robust & good feature set. I've also tried the micro versions on the reduced flash/RAM Linksys revisions. It's a tad slow, but performance seems OK. Control of output power is also useful.

 

[Tim Murray]

I've had good luck with DD-WRT.

 

[AlNom]

I'm still using a WRT54G v2.0, and I'm ok with Thibor15c + HyperWRT. Someday I'll upgrade the hardware.... someday when 802.11n completely replaces 802.11g as the dominant standard.

 

[Frank]

If you can attach a usb drive, you can install Debian as well. You can also download custom images for many of those kind of routers. Cons: harder to set up, you need an external drive. Pros: You get it all.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Well I finally installed the latest 2.4 of DD-WRT. I was fed up with the way the standard buffalo software would every few days just stop logging, or simply not serve the admin GUI until a hard reset.

Oh wow.

The replacement firmware is faster, works better, has newer software components, and has about a zillion times more options and functionality than the original manufacturer's firmware, and it's being improved all the time. Not just doing the same stuff better, but whole new chunks of functionality like SNMP, traffic monitoring, QOS, wireless seach and mapping, etc, and that's before you get to the extra installable packages.

I'm glad I made a point of buying a router that could take take third party firmware, because it's like day and night between the original firmware and the third party versions that are simply a geek's delight of features.

There's no way the manufacturers can compete on this kind of quality, nor do they want to. They'd rather you spend a few hundred on a business class router, rather than £25 on a home router that can be made to do everything and more. Before you buy a router, I recommend checking out the OpenWRT or DDWRT pages to make sure you get one that can take the much better third party firmware, and not get stuck with one of the big name products with hacked down hardware specs.

 

[nutball]

It does rather rock, doesn't it?! Turns the WRT54G into The Little Router That Could

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

It does rather rock, doesn't it?! Turns the WRT54G into The Little Router That Could

If you have one of the older WRT54Gs. The new ones are very cut down in terms of RAM and flash memory, quite sluggish on throughput, and no one likes them for replacement firmware. Since Cisco bought Linksys, their home/SOHO products have become progressively stripped down so as not to cannibalise sales of Cisco's business products. You can spend significantly less money on a Buffalo with a better or the same CPU, and more memory/nvram, which is pretty much what I did.

I wouldn't recommend a name brand like Linksys or Netgear at the moment. For lower end products, you can get better hardware from smaller companies, and boost it up with these mega-featured third party firmwares.

 

[INKster]

DD-WRT here. And in two different WiFi routers.

 

[nutball]

If you have one of the older WRT54Gs.

That's what e-Bay is for WRT54GL's are still available, though they're £40 or so.

Since Cisco bought Linksys, their home/SOHO products have become progressively stripped down so as not to cannibalise sales of Cisco's business products.

Yes this is true. I've seen many a Linksys box sat in places where I'm sure Cisco would rather have a Cisco-branded box doing the same job for ten times the money.

I wouldn't recommend a name brand like Linksys or Netgear at the moment. For lower end products, you can get better hardware from smaller companies, and boost it up with these mega-featured third party firmwares.

A fair point, though it does require a little bit of research to find out what's what (once upon a time it was easy -- buy a Linksys!). *sigh* why do marketeers seem to be hell-bent on making the market so complicated (errr... OK yeah I think I know the answer to that ).

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

That's what e-Bay is for WRT54GL's are still available, though they're £40 or so.

You have to be careful what version you get, but luckily all that info is on the DD-WRT and OpenWRT websites. Seems a bit unnecessary when you can get better Buffalo products for £25-30. Especially important when older routers may not have the cpu power to deal with today's faster broadband speeds.

A fair point, though it does require a little bit of research to find out what's what (once upon a time it was easy -- buy a Linksys!). *sigh* why do marketeers seem to be hell-bent on making the market so complicated (errr... OK yeah I think I know the answer to that ).

It's pretty easy now. OpenWRT have a full list of all supported hardware and versions, as do DD-WRT. In fact DD-WRT also have a list of top recommended products:

Current Top-Ranked Routers:

• Cheapest: Buffalo WHR-G125
• Fastest DD-WRT Performance*: Avila Gateworks GW2348-4
• Most memory: Routerboard 532A or Avila Gateworks GW2348-4
• Most flexible options (antennas, external storage, etc): Avila Gateworks GW2348-4
• Best range using built-in antenna: Buffalo WHR-HP-G54

There's a lot of info to sort through, but it's worth it to get something so much better with the addition of aftermarket firmware.

 

[Cryect]

Curious how is 2.4 of DD-WRT?

I've been using 2.3 SP2 for a while now and definately love how it performs better than the default firmware (mainly because you can increase the number of IP sockets it will keep in its table which I could easily exceed on the default firmware).

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Curious how is 2.4 of DD-WRT?

I've been using 2.3 SP2 for a while now and definately love how it performs better than the default firmware (mainly because you can increase the number of IP sockets it will keep in its table which I could easily exceed on the default firmware).

There is a 23 SP3 in the beta downloads which has several bug fixes and seems to have stopped development at the end of '06 in preference for work on 24. I'm running the latest 24 beta and it seems to be pretty good to me. Very stable and fast, but I'm not using wireless clients. 24 was a big reorganisation and rewrite, so there are some thing still to be completed (like the built in Tomato style bandwidth monitor), but I'm not having any problems with it.

 

[stevem]

Especially important when older routers may not have the cpu power to deal with today's faster broadband speeds.

My old v2.0 WRT54GS has twice the flash/RAM of the WRT54G/GL/Buffalo units & faster clocked Broadcom processor. Even the original WRT54G had the same speed Broadcom processor as the current reduced flash/RAM equivlent, WRT54GL, & equivalent Asus/Buffalo units.

I'll have to try DD-WRT v2.4...

I've been using 2.3 SP2 for a while now and definately love how it performs better than the default firmware (mainly because you can increase the number of IP sockets it will keep in its table which I could easily exceed on the default firmware).

Any serious downloader will be using a BSD firewall & managed gigabit switch...

 

[the maddman]

I'll add another voice to the "Use DD-WRT" crowd. I use one to be a firewall between my cable modem and my Linux server, it works great, no worries, and with the latest releases of DD-WRT, you can use the web interface to add custom iptables rules. I don't use the WiFi on mine though.