02 October 2006

Wireless Routers and the Linksys WRT54G

My dad gave me a Linksys Wireless router (WRT54G) and it looks ug-leeee, so I never used it and bought a more stylish looking one which turned out not to work properly to the point I got so annoyed I threw it away.

So I dug out the WRT54G and plugged it in. It worked flawlessly until today when my two router network decided to eat itself. Eventually after much resetting I got it all up and running again, but I discovered that with heavy network traffic like P2P (and probably my surfing habits) it can crash due to keeping a record of everything for five days.

A quick websearch lead me to the Wikipedia Article on the Linksys WRT54G and reading that I realised exactly what I had. The company had opened up the firmware and there were a variety of open source versions available. I then read this FAQ for utorrent where it describes what firmware it recommends and how to avoid overloading the router. Never being afraid of destroying hardware I installed HyperWRT Thibor on the router (there is a decent Wikipedia page for HyperWRT as well). Once it rebooted I saw how many extra features are in there now. Needless to say I am buying only Linksys routers from now on...