DD-WRT for those with flaky routers

[Vexira]

Originally Posted by trevius

IMO, the real time network traffic graphs alone make DD-WRT worthwhile. I hear great stuff about Tomato as well, but haven't tried it yet. The first time I tried DD-WRT a year or so ago, it was causing some weird issues with DHCP refresh from my ISP that would essentially break my internet connection until the router was power-cycled. I recently replaced my old Linksys WRT54G with I think the GS model that has much more memory (16MBs), and loaded DD-WRT on it. Since then, I haven't had a single issue related to the firmware. It works great and the advanced routing options and QoS are great if you have use for them. Being able to increase the Max Ports that the router can use is really nice. Seeing how many active connections are being used and what IPs are using them is good. The automatic logging is good as well. And, I like that you can add as many port range forwards as you want. I don't think most of this stuff exists in the default Linksys firmware. I am sure Tomato probably has all of these features as well.

The new Linksys firmware is actually really nice, and most people probably wouldn't have much need to make the switch to another brand of firmware like this. But, for the people who do have a need, there are some really nice options out there. Also, in reply to the statement about it being easy to brick a router with DD-WRT, that may have been true in the past, but it isn't nearly as true now. I am sure it is still possible to do, but they have quite a bit of ways to get out of major mess-ups. I missed a step in the install the first time, and thought I had hosed the whole thing, but luckily there was a fairly simple backout plan with quite a few options in case any of the steps failed. It all depends on the model of router you are using, but even with what might seem like a bricked router, many of them can support sending firmware via FTP or other ways even if the current firmware on the router is hosed up.

There is also a compact (micro) version of DD-WRT that does support most Linksys routers with low memory. I wouldn't personally recommend it though, because that is the version that I had DHCP issues with in the past. I think the Micro version is basically the same thing with some of the fat trimmed, but I can't say for sure if they just fixed the DHCP issue for all versions, or if it was something that the full version was able to resolve for me.

Well, I just went out and bought a new dlink router and it has all of the options the DD-WRT added to my old WRT54G so I am happy. I also had that issue with the router dropping its ip that the modem issued to it. It comes with the territory of using the newer linksys routers. They put less memory in them (if my memory serves me correctly) because of dd-wrt and tomato.