Creating A Super-Router (For Free)

Aaron writes "Kind of an interesting discussion and story over at Broadband Reports about the flurry of vendors releasing modified Linux based firmware updates for the Linksys WRT54G router. The updates bring a whole new level of functionality Linksys couldn't be bothered to incorporate. Among a long list of free improvements is the incorporation of bandwidth management, allowing users to end the days of choppy VoIP conversations without swapping out hardware."

Comments

For the do it yourselfer

[yebb]

Want to hack your Linksys WRT54G Router yourself?

Here's a detailed guide on how to do just that.

Re:For the do it yourselfer

[epiphani]

And for the lazyass:

This guy has packaged firmware flashes that incorporate the most popular expansions. All I wanted was some basic SNMP, and it provided - along with some other handy features.

Wondershaper...

[garcia]

For those of you that don't know, and are interested, Wondershaper can be found HERE.

It is AMAZING.

Sample config:

DOWNLINK=6000
UPLINK=200
DEV=eth0

# low priority source ports
NOPRIOPORTSRC="6881 6882 6883 6884 6885 6886 6887 6888 6889 80"

Sets those ports to only use up 200k of my 256k upstream leaving me the rest for SSH etc. I never have any problems w/my remote connection speeds this way. It's fantastic.

I have only had a single problem, recently, with Debian unstable... It removed my libatm for some reason. I reinstalled that and all was well.

Highly recommended for everyone, not just users of this "hackable" router.

Re:Wondershaper...

[pacman on prozac]

Sets those ports to only use up 200k of my 256k upstream leaving me the rest for SSH etc.

Not quite, you're shaping your entire uplink to 200kb and not using the extra at all. To quote the wondershaper source:

# shape everything at $UPLINK speed - this prevents huge queues in your
# DSL modem which destroy latency:
# main class

tc class add dev $DEV parent 1: classid 1:1 cbq rate ${UPLINK}kbit \
allot 1500 prio 5 bounded isolated

Thats the class all uploads are shaped through. If you read the script all the other traffic classes are set with parent 1:1 which is the classid of the above. With tc you have to run all traffic through the available classes otherwise it gets 0kb rather than any remaining bandwidth, I accidently broke a netcafe once by forgetting to put DNS traffic into any class. Wondershaper does actually assign all traffic to 3 classes within the above, each with differing priority.

The ports you mention are given lower priority but within that class, so within that bandwidth set in $UPLINK.

hack for WAP54G - higher power output

[davids-world.com]

i'd like to recommend the Neo firmware hack, which boosts the Linksys WAP54G output. That solved some problems for me :)

Is that linux based system available for the WAP as well? (Dunno if it's got enough RAM & flash memory to run&store it...)

Re:hack for WAP54G - higher power output

[swfranklin]

Please, unless you live waaay out in the sticks.... the 2.4GHz band is getting crowded enough; cranking up your WAP output by 4 times just so you can use a laptop in the basement crapper can be a very un-neighborly thing to do. I'm having a hard time coming up with a channel that isn't being stomped on or stomping on someone else's nearby WLAN.

Thats pretty cool and all, but

[steak]

I like my ClarkConnect box better. All it cost me was a pile of old parts that were headed for the dumpster and a ~300 MB download.

OPENWRT!

[Anonymous Coward]

OPENWRT!

http://openwrt.sourceforge.net/

Re:Different routers?

[amias]

I use a Netgear DG834G which appears to run linux 2.4.17 on its MIPS malta processor.

You can download a bundle of the packages it uses from netgear but they are not configured so its
hard to patch or hack with it cos you'd have to
redo their work.

This seems at odds with the GPL , on the grounds
that if you use GPL'ed code you must publish not
just the original source but your modifications as well . or am i wrong ?

The firmware upgrade patch is easily dissasembled and i've managed to hack the file system (cramfs) out of the firmware . So there is a possiblilty
that modifying the filesystem might open up safer
modification by making telnet accessable. but i'm
too much of a chicken to try it and i expect the
checksum would fail.

Re:What about 6to4 tunneling?

[NotoriousQ]

6to4 is your friend. For linux please refer to the Linux IPv6 HOWTO

For windows, go to your network configuration. Find your lan, and enable their IPv6 driver. XP only.(SP1 only?) I believe it self configures to use anycast, so that should be it.

Mac....do not know. I assume something along the lines of what linux does will work.

Good luck.

Re:Cisco will try to stop this somehow

[dagnabit]

I have a friend who used to work at Cisco. After the Linksys acquisition, they put management barriers in place so that people from the Cisco side of the house would be blocked from "infiltrating" and/or influencing Linksys with anything Cisco-related.

Cisco (at the time anyway) wanted to keep them "as is"... dunno if that's still the case or not.