DD-WRT Posted July 3, 2006 at 10:34 pm

No, it’s not the next Dance Dance Revolution game. It’s the new firmware for my router. I recently lost my Linksys WRT54G wireless router to a lightning hit, and I was subsequently forced to replace it. I replaced my trusty WRT with the similar, but newer WRT54GL, also from Linksys. This provided an opportunity to re-explore the world of third-party WRT firmwares, whereupon I found the DD-WRT project, which seems to have overtaken the original Sveasoft firmware as the top third-party firmware for Linksys (and a few others) routers.

These third-party firmwares generally aim to provide functionality above and beyond that provided out of the box by Linksys, and the DD-WRT project does this as well. Most of the features are aimed at business users who want a cheap alternative to enterprise-class networking equipment sold at enterprise-class pricing. Personally, I don’t find most of the added utility very useful in my home network, but I did find a few reasons to switch over.

My favorite feature that DD-WRT and similar firmwares provide is Static DHCP. The premise is simple. You want the convenience of network autoconfiguration while ensuring that your machines always receive the same IP address, which is useful in a mixed platform setting where you can’t rely on WINS to automagically resolve IPs from machine names. With Static DHCP, you can associate an IP with a MAC address and the DHCP server (i.e., your router) will always hand out that IP address to the adapter with the associated MAC address. Nifty, eh? This feature alone made the free upgrade worth my time.

Beyond that, DD-WRT just has a slick web interface. It’s easy on the eyes while adding in the new functionality and gobs of status info; way better than the standard Linksys fare.

I should note that flashing your router with third-party firmware may void your warranty, and there’s the possibility that the upgrade process will go awry and you’ll end up with a dead router. Personally, these aren’t major issues because 1) these routers are not terribly large investments and 2) I’m reasonably confident that nothing will go wrong. Still, you’ve been warned.

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  1. Titus Barik said:
    July 7th, 2006 at 11:04 pm

    Actually, the warranty on your older router was voided, because one of the Sveasoft updates did corrupt the firmware. I had to open the device and jumper two pins together to short it, if you recall. Always set boot_wait before using custom firmware!

  2. Adam said:
    July 7th, 2006 at 11:20 pm

    I do recall the incident, just not the details. I wasn’t sure if it was the mere act of flashing with unofficial firmware or actually opening the unit that voided the warranty.

    In any case, the boot_wait option is enabled by default in the latest DD-WRT releases. It can also be toggled through the Administration tab in the Web interface.

  3. Titus Barik said:
    July 8th, 2006 at 10:46 pm

    One of the things I did notice is that DD-WRT has an OpenVPN build. Since I use OpenVPN a lot these days between all my different machines, I’m curious to see what this feature will do.

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