dd-wrt v24 SP1 and my WHR-G54S
AlexDeGruven
Wut?Meechigan Icrontian
Just had a great experience upgrading to and using the latest stable dd-wrt on my cheapo buffalo router, so I thought I'd share a bit.
My hardware is a $40 (in 2005) Buffalo WHR-G54S wireless router. I picked it up because my previous Linksys compact router bit it only about 1 year into use. When I started looking, I wanted to pick up something that I could use with a custom firmware because I'm a nerd and I like to do goofy stuff like that (My wife STILL has yet to understand why I like to hack things up. 'Because it's fun!' doesn't fly with her.).
After about 3 days of dorking around with the included firmware, which wasn't TOO bad, I decided to fire up dd-wrt. It loaded up beautifully, and gave me a lot of options that were not available stock. The main modification I made was to pump the TX power up to 70mW, the maximum safe recommended power. Doing this made my wireless connection solidly available everywhere in my house, and outside on my deck. Seeing as there are 8 unprotected networks visible from my living room, I took only minimal steps to secure mine by turning on the MAC filter and turning off the SSID broadcast. I know neither of these offers any real protection, but I just wanted to do something to bring my fruit up above the many low-hangers.
Fast-forward to the last few weeks. I got a cheap upgrade from Charter (16Mbit + Line service for $3.99/month extra), and decided to start utilizing it. At this point, however, I start to develop a lot of problems maintaining a connection. It would work fine for about 2 hours, then would slow way down and require me to restart it. I checked through all the logs and made sure nobody was doing anything nefarious. When that came up clean, I decided to look into updating to a new version of dd-wrt.
Tuesday night, I went through the instructions and updated the router. It was insanely easy, requiring me to simply wget the new image, paste it down, and reboot. That was it. A reset to factory cleared out old settings, and we were up and running again. This time, I decided to add a bit of security and set things up with WPA2 so I don't have to worry about everyone suddenly locking their networks down making ME the low-hanging fruit. I may investigate adding a RADIUS server to the mix and enabling 802.1x in the future, but it really feels like overkill for my 3 wireless client systems at home.
v24 SP1 is pretty straightforward, and doesn't offer a huge number of features over v23, but there is one really significant thing that I found to be fantastic: The ability to create virtualized wireless network connections. In other words, you can create a number of secondary WiFi networks with their own security settings and even choose whether they are bridged to the main network or not.
I didn't think I'd use this ability until I attempted to connect my Wii to the newly reconfigured wireless. The Wii has an interesting quirk in that it will support WPA2-Personal, but only with AES. I had already set everything up for WPA2-Personal with TKIP, and I really didn't feel like re-doing it again. So, I simply fired up a virtual wireless network (with a MAC filter) using WPA with AES, and attached the Wii to that. It worked perfectly the first time.
That's all for now on this. I hope my experience might be useful to others.
My hardware is a $40 (in 2005) Buffalo WHR-G54S wireless router. I picked it up because my previous Linksys compact router bit it only about 1 year into use. When I started looking, I wanted to pick up something that I could use with a custom firmware because I'm a nerd and I like to do goofy stuff like that (My wife STILL has yet to understand why I like to hack things up. 'Because it's fun!' doesn't fly with her.).
After about 3 days of dorking around with the included firmware, which wasn't TOO bad, I decided to fire up dd-wrt. It loaded up beautifully, and gave me a lot of options that were not available stock. The main modification I made was to pump the TX power up to 70mW, the maximum safe recommended power. Doing this made my wireless connection solidly available everywhere in my house, and outside on my deck. Seeing as there are 8 unprotected networks visible from my living room, I took only minimal steps to secure mine by turning on the MAC filter and turning off the SSID broadcast. I know neither of these offers any real protection, but I just wanted to do something to bring my fruit up above the many low-hangers.
Fast-forward to the last few weeks. I got a cheap upgrade from Charter (16Mbit + Line service for $3.99/month extra), and decided to start utilizing it. At this point, however, I start to develop a lot of problems maintaining a connection. It would work fine for about 2 hours, then would slow way down and require me to restart it. I checked through all the logs and made sure nobody was doing anything nefarious. When that came up clean, I decided to look into updating to a new version of dd-wrt.
Tuesday night, I went through the instructions and updated the router. It was insanely easy, requiring me to simply wget the new image, paste it down, and reboot. That was it. A reset to factory cleared out old settings, and we were up and running again. This time, I decided to add a bit of security and set things up with WPA2 so I don't have to worry about everyone suddenly locking their networks down making ME the low-hanging fruit. I may investigate adding a RADIUS server to the mix and enabling 802.1x in the future, but it really feels like overkill for my 3 wireless client systems at home.
v24 SP1 is pretty straightforward, and doesn't offer a huge number of features over v23, but there is one really significant thing that I found to be fantastic: The ability to create virtualized wireless network connections. In other words, you can create a number of secondary WiFi networks with their own security settings and even choose whether they are bridged to the main network or not.
I didn't think I'd use this ability until I attempted to connect my Wii to the newly reconfigured wireless. The Wii has an interesting quirk in that it will support WPA2-Personal, but only with AES. I had already set everything up for WPA2-Personal with TKIP, and I really didn't feel like re-doing it again. So, I simply fired up a virtual wireless network (with a MAC filter) using WPA with AES, and attached the Wii to that. It worked perfectly the first time.
That's all for now on this. I hope my experience might be useful to others.
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Comments
As a side note, I believe AES is more secure than TKIP; is there a reason you went with the latter?
Force of habit, more than anything else. For whatever reason, it's what we use here at work, so that's just immediately where I went with it.