I have heard several different people talking about dd-wrt. I never fully paid attention to it because I did not have a use for it. Recently I needed a way to do something with a wireless router that the included firmware would not allow. After some brief research looked like dd-wrt was the thing for me.
My father owns his own business. He decided he was going to move into semi-retirement and decided to get rid of his office space and move his office into their basement. All of the equipment he has is old, at least 5 years old and depends on a wired Ethernet network. While it would be easy to re-establish the LAN in the basement, the challenge is that the Internet connection is 2 stories up, into a bedroom that had already been converted into my mom's home office.
What to do? Yes I could go through the expense of buying wireless cards and bridges for all of the equipment, but that was really not in the budget. Again the goal here was to reduce costs.
One of the many jobs I had in college was to run cable. Yes I am/was a certified Cat 5 installer. Did I really want to go through the trouble of drilling through two floor plates and crawling around in the attic? College was a long time ago and the answer to that one was a definite no.
I have somehow grown a stack of Linksys WRT54G's. I googled to see if there was some way to turn a Linksys router into a wireless client and lo and behold came up with dd-wrt which claimed to do exactly what I wanted to do.
dd-wrt replaces the default Linksys firmware with an open source version. This version, no other way to say it, unlocks the full potential of the router. dd-wrt provides so many features for the router, including turning the router into a wireless client. This allows the router to use its wireless connection to connect to another wireless router and turns the ports in the back of the router into bridged ports on the first wireless network. Perfect! This is exactly what I am looking for.
There is great list of supported devices on the dd-wrt website. The thing that one quickly learns is that there are many version of routers in the same packaging. For example there are 8 versions of the Linksys WRT54G. Installation of the dd-wrt firmware is dependent on the exact model you have. In may case I was able to use a toolkit called, VXWorks. VXWorks has you load a a new firmware file into the router, which in turn has the ability to load the dd-wrt firmware into the router.
The directions say to use the dd-wrt mega file. I tried several times and the tftp load process kept timing out. I found a file in the same download directory named mini, and gave it a shot. It loaded without any issues. I quite frankly don't know the difference between the mega and mini files. The mini provided the functionality that I was looking for and hence my drive or desire to figure out what the mega file was diminished. Anyone out there know?
With the dd-wrt firmware loaded I was able to turn the router into a wireless client of the upstairs router. Now all of the devices can get to the Internet!
Obviously a wireless link is slower than a wired one, but the speeds are more than acceptable for what they need. dd-wrt totally rocks and saved me the trouble of having to put in an Ethernet drop and anyone who has ever run cable knows just how big a relief that is!
