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Linksys Adds Linux WRT54G Model Back
Glenn Fleishman writes "Last month, Slashdot and others wrote about how the Linksys WRT54G, a popular embedded Linux-based Wi-Fi gateway, had switched to VxWorks's OS for its v5 release. Because the WRT54G has become the standard as a cheap commodity device for building your own platform (like Sveasoft, Fon, and many others), this seemed like a big blow to hackers and developers. If you could still manage to flash the device--not sure if that was possible--it had half the RAM and flash of the v4 model. It turns out Linksys wasn't killing the Linux model. They've released it as the WRT54GL with v4.30.0(US) firmware and will sell it under that name for about $70 retail. It's already in stock and the new firmware is on their GPL software download page. Linux sales represent a few percentage points of their overall volume, based on the Linksys product director's remarks. The lesser quantity of RAM puts money back in their pockets on the mainstream model."
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this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
The v4.0 (which I have) uses a SoC that combines two chips from the v3.3. It's pretty much exactly the same software wise, just cheaper for Linksys to make.
Here at my work at an small local ISP we use small Soekris boards running Freebsd. Not only is this hardware rock solid but running a fully featured distro gives us the ability to easily remotely trouble shoot network connectivity issues or firewall rules, or routing tables from here in the office.
:)
We mount them in outdoor enclosures for use as access points or as small deployable routers/firewalls for fiber set ups.
However they are rather pricey (250 - 450 dollars a pop) so still a lot less than comparable cisco hardware, but still too expensive to drop on the porch of a customer.
The question I've had for a while is whether or not I can as a distributor legaly hack a linksys router and drop our own distro on it, and give those out to customers. At a much more affordable price.
I called linksys the other day but the lady I talked to had no idea and never called me back
~Anders
I used to run sveasoft on my linksys, but after reading more and more about their business practises, I let my account expire, and have now permanently dropped them in favor of the DD-WRT firmware (http://www.dd-wrt.com/).
DD-WRT is just as feature-rich (if not more) than sveasoft, and doesn't play sveasoft's silly games with their firmware source code, the GPL, and banning people on their forums. Sadly I can no longer recommend sveasoft to any of my friends with linksys routers.
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
When I purchased the "new" WRT54G, version 5, I expected a router that would at least have better performance than my old, reliable Pentium-II firewall running Windows 2003 and Routing and Remote Services.
Boy was I wrong. Many sites, such as: http://www.tmobile.com/ http://www.realtor.com/ and http://www.gamespot.com/ all had great difficulty loading. It turns out a **LOT** of other people are having the same problem with the Version 5 WRT54G.
My longstanding issue was finally escalated to Linksys Customer Support (you will be escalated to Customer support after dealing with Technical support). At Customer Support, they RMA'd my v5 router, and replaced it with a v4 router. I demanded that they replace it with a v4 router, and I noted that a *LOT* of people on this bulletin board are having the EXACT same problem.
I have literally spent hours trying to solve this problem on the v5 router. As soon as I plugged the v4 router in, my problems were solved!
Of course, Linksys being a company that enjoys wasting their customers' time by not even admitting a problem, you will be forced to pay for shipping charges. No matter that the item is clearly flawed by engineering defects to begin with. I will never, ever, consider buying a Linksys in the future. What a mistake I made thinking they were a premium brand. The fact that they are going to sell a version that finally works as it should, under a different model number and at a higher price, rather than fix the WRT54G Version 5 tells me that they are not interested in providing a quality product. I hope their strategy blows up in their face!
I can't say I disagree with you, but as I work for a semiconductor manufacturer, I would like to expand on what 'unreliable' means in this case.
Actually, most consumer electronics devices are 'unreliable' in the sense that they experience relatively high failure rates (compared to, say, telecommunications infrastructure devices). This is a result of the (lack of) burn in done before the parts are deployed. Simply stated, it is cheaper to have consumer electronics fail in the field than to burn in all of the parts before-hand. This is not unique to Linksys.
Consumer devices are generally 250 FIT or higher for early failure rate [first year]. A FIT (failure in time) is the ratio of failed devices (in parts per million) to running time (in thousands of power on hours [kpoh])... so 250 FITS translates into 2500 parts per million (ppm) failing after 10 kpoh. That's really reasonable for consumer devices (0.25% failure in the first year). The average failure rate over the life of the consumer semiconductor (probably rated for 100K or 200K poh) is around 100 FITS.
As a side note, telecommunications devices are generally a higher standard, with early failure rate below 65 FIT and average failure rate below 25 FIT. The burn-in required to reduce the failure rate (since most of the failures occur early in the lifecycle, stress testing a part early on can trigger many of the early failures) costs a bundle of money, and can add enough expense to a part to eliminate the entire profit margin on a consumer device. Of course, for more important applications (telecom, brake systems in vehicles, medical equipment), higher reliability parts are used.
So yes, 'mainstream' (actually 'low margin and low risk in case of failure') does mean lower quality, but please don't bash the manufacturers too hard for it. Economics forces their hand, and the result is the system that is set up to take the returns, as you experienced.
> The question I've had for a while is whether or not I can as a distributor legaly hack a
> linksys router and drop our own distro on it, and give those out to customers.
Depends on which hack you install. Hyperwrt is a modified copy of the Linksys code. While the linux binaries and a lot of the other stuff is licensed under the GPL, you might want to make sure it ALL is. Openwrt on the other hand is plain old linux. No licensing problems there at all.
As for the other reply about a EULA, ignore that guy. You are buying hardware. Hardware IS sold and not licensed. Yes there is software embedded in it, but you are planning on blanking that out before you resell it so that is a moot point. The day a judge says a piece of hardware sold over the counter at Walmart is bound by an unsigned EULA is the day I declare the Revolution to have begun and load up my 'sporting goods'.
Democrat delenda est
The wrt comes 'off the shelf' for about $70 (depending on where you buy it), comes in a nice little case, complete with power supply, 5 ethernet ports, wifi, antennas, and as a bonus, inside the box is a 6' ethernet cable and a nice coaster (cd). If you are going thru enough of them (I have over 1000 in the field), you will never run out of 90 day 'free trials' for an anti virus, every one of those coasters has one of those too.
I use the wrt as an edge device, loaded with my own custom firmware specific to our network. It can go out to any location, and they just plug it in. When it 'wakes up' at the new location, it brings up a vpn link back to head office. Voila, instant access to locations from the arctic down to locations in mexico. It's solid state, not a power hunger computer, and gives me all the flexibility I need in a custom linux edge device.
With the numbers I have in the field, it's important to look at the 'total cost deployed', not just the sticker price on the 'basic item before necessary add-ons'. If I could deploy gumstix at even double the cost of using wrt54, I probably would, but I cant. the reality is, I can put 3 WRT routers into a location for about what it would cost to build up a gumstix with ethernet and wifi, and it still needs an external switch to give multiple ports.
The WRT54 has yet one more fabulous redeeming feature. It's available EVERYWHERE. On more than one occaision, instead of shipping a pre-configured router, i've had somebody run to the local computer store, buy a wrt54, take it back to the office, plug it into a dsl connect and give me remote admin access. 10 minutes later, it's re-flashed, and they have a highly customized router that automatically integrates into the bigger picture corporate network.
Bottom line, gumstix and wrt54 are not similar platforms. gumstix is a hackers toy, meant for hardware hackers that want to do thier own soldering to hook it up to stuff. WRT54 is a complete/finished edge device, ready to go, out of the box, just add firmware.
If you are going to go on a rant like that, at least get your details right, otherwise you look like a blathering fool. The WRT54GS prior to version 4 (what you get now thru retail channels) had 8 meg of flash, 32 meg of ram. The G models had 4 meg flash, and 16 meg of ram. I always wondered why linksys did this, because the GS never did use the extra ram or flash, but I certainly use it on a lot of my installations. The GS models now come with 4 meg of flash, and 16 meg of ram, same as the G always had. I'm not surprised, thier firmware doesn't need the extra hardware, why put it on the boards to begin with ?
I've got about 200 WRT54G and 800 WRT54GS in the field. Have I been screwed by linksys ? Well, if you call putting out a thousand edge devices for well under $100 each being 'screwed', well, then I got screwed, and, please, do it again. this is the kind of screwing we really enjoy. But, before this deployment started, we did have questions about product availability and lifespan, questions we asked directly of linksys. The answers were as expected, the basic non answer one expected. Comparing our options, we chose to accept this risk, and started the deployment about 18 months ago, averaging a little over 50 a month since then, and still going strong. the point is, we did the risk analysis before starting deployment, and accepted the product change cycle risk as a possible point in the future that would break our plan. so far, it's not been a problem, we've been able to keep pace with the product change cycle.
The WRT54G product has allowed me to leverage the manufacturing might of linksys, onto a highly customized platform with our own in house firmware, and deploy a LOT of very capable routers, and a previously unheard of price point, buying for under $100 each. If I had used cisco equipment, and contracted 'cisco experts', the total cost would be well over a million dollars spent today, and, in all honesty, it would never have happened, our budget didn't have that kind of money to spend. I didn't use cisco 'experts' to design the network, I designed it myself. I started with OpenWRT, set up my own package repository on a server in our data center, and built up a custom package set that meets our needs. I've got a thousand routers spread across north america, every one of them religiously checking for firmware updates on a centralized server twice a day. They all have full time vpn connections running, and, the net result is a wide area network that gives all my small locations a full time connection to the corporate network, using a cheap dsl or cable connection from local sources. It's transparent to the offices, nobody at the offices has to fuss with vpn on thier pc's, and, we get wifi thrown in as a bonus. Sales staff LOVE it, they show up at any office, and voila, instant connection over wifi. The hardware cost to date, is just under $100K, and, within the company, I'm a hero for even coming up with the idea, never mind having it implemented and deployed.
The upcoming WRT54GL is good news for me, because it shows that linksys is validating the model we are using. I would have been much happier if the GL had the 8/32 form factor, could care less about the SpeedBooster tho. My supplier has quoted me the GL platform at about $10 less than what my last batch of GS V4.0 cost, so, the price break is gonna be noticed/appreciated here. If the GL was 10 dollars more instead of 10 dollars cheaper, I'd still be happy.
I dont have a lot of patience for folks that bitch about how linksys handles the WRT54 product line. They produce and put into the retail chain a router that's an ideal hardware platform for numerous edge device roles. They leverage thier manufacturing and distribution ability to get that thing to us at a sub $100 price point, even paying full retail. I dont believe for a minute that I'm the only one deploying these things at a tremendous rate to get 'real work' done, at a ver
They have issued DMCA takedown notices and gone to completely unscrupulous lengths to get critics and distributors of 'their' firmware shut down and taken off the net, including accusations of hacking to get individual cablemodem accounts shut down.
The simple fact that they're using MAC-address locking on GPLed software should tell you most of what you need to know about their ethics.
Early on in this whole mess, I posted something that was gently critical of their GPL policy, and instantly had my account revoked. Fortunately, they gave me my $20 back, but then I kept digging and found out what sleazebags they really are.
NOT good people. DON'T give them money.
For more info, check the journal of TheIndividual.
You are confused, you view nat as a _bad_ thing, and publicly addressible computers via ipv6 as a _good_ thing. That's fine in theory, but, out here in the real world, the internet is a nasty place, and to put a windows machine into a slot where it is ip accessible from the outside, well, that's just begging for problems.
being on a public ipv6 addrss is much safer than on a public ipv4 address simply because the hit rate of random attacks is about 16 billion billion times lower. but yes there is still the possibility of targeted attacks (e.g. by a server you connect to) and windows is shitty enough to make running it on a network that is end to end open require care.
but anyway you can have a no incoming connections unless i specify otherwise policy perfectly easilly without having nat.
say for example you wan't to be able to admin all your boxes remotely with ssh. it would seem far more convinaiant to be able to just say "allow ssh from theese ips" once rather than making a mapping for every single machine and trying to memorise which port maps to ssh on which machine.
and besides if someone really wants to get into any nontrivial sized network its probablly not that hard to get a box on the inside.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register