Wanted to try out new firmware on my Linksys WRT54G wireless router, ever since it began behaving erratic by dropping wireless clients for no reason. Since it’s a 3 year old version 5 router, with only 2MB of flash memory, the only option I had was to follow the Vxworks flashing instructions, in order to get DD-WRT micro on it. After a couple of days of trying, all I ever got to was the Upgrade are failed! screen.
Rather than continue and possibly brick the router, I decided to visit Amazon yesterday and order myself a WRT54GL, this is a reissue of the version 4 router, the one with 4MB of flash memory that ran Linux.
The UPS lady delivered it to my door this morning and a short 30 minutes later, I had it flashed with Tomato 1.23.
The wireless router is on the first floor, towards the back of the house, with clients scattered all about. Once I had the wireless configured, with the transmit power up to 70mW, I ran upstairs to check on the new Vista powered laptop. The laptop’s wireless desktop gadget showed a signal strength of 76%, where it normally hovered around 50%. The laptop that’s a first floor floater, reported excellent signal strength and all 5 bars were lit up throughout the level. What a difference software makes, I thought.
There’s more options to tweak, like QOS, so that my Vonage phone doesn’t go staticky when we’re all hammering the net. I also want to enable static dhcp, that way laptops remain dhcp enabled for their excursions to Starbucks but receive static IPs within my home network. And with the bandwidth monitoring tools at hand, I’m ready should Time Warner decide to start capping our usage.
Only two things that money can’t buy
That’s true love and homegrown tomatoes