DD-WRT Router firmware.

I recently ran into trouble with my ISP and had to leech off a neighbors signal for a couple weeks until the ISP is working again. I live in a brick house with a brick wall around it. Making it nearly impossible for my signal to reach a neighbor. I had a few routers sitting around from old projects I worked on. None of the router had repeater functions built into the firmware, but I had read about alternative firmware a year or two ago.

Enter DD-WRT, people say dd-wrt make a $60 router into a $600 router. It open all the possibilities of the hardware in the router. Some router are easy to upgrade via the web based gui firmware upgrade. Others need a port installed on the routers board in the most extreme cases. One of the routers I had was able to upgrade to DD-WRT v24 via the web gui firmware upgrade. I set the router up with dd-wrt and installed it in a weatherproof box and mounted it outside of my house. Once I had setup the router as a repeater I could connect to the router via wifi and choose which AP I wanted to connect to.

If you are in a remote location or have a difficult wifi situation this might be the solution for you.

DD-WRT forum
Supported_Devices

The neighbors I do connect to have given me permission when I secured their networks for them :p. I have upgraded 3 other linksys routers with no problem. I have read about people bricking routers, but I think it's mostly not taking the time to read through enough resources. A few sources had the old or outdated instructions.

I agree if you don't know what you are doing you need to either not do it or be prepared to waste $60(cost of the router)

I "upgraded" an old Linksys WRT54G router with the OpenWRT firmware awhile ago and haven't gone back since. It even displaced my Apple Extreme Base station.

Linksys makes a version of their router called the WRT54GL specifically designed to be "upgraded."

In my case I wanted the power of Linux iptables to create outbound firewall rules. Now the only thing that leaves the section of my network with the Warcraft boxes is traffic to and from Blizzard. Unless someone has created a keylogger that communicates thru Warcraft, they should have fun getting the logged keys. With Linux, you can also do things like create rules that raise alerts when any computers tries to send other traffic to the Internet.

I was tempted to pick up another Linksys WRT54G and operate them in a failover cluster, but figured out I was already getting better uptime then some Cisco setups I've been forced to deal with.


I vote to let people brick as much hardware as they are willing to risk - even if they don't understand what they are doing. We need the equivalent of a metal fork and an electrical socket around here.