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Netgear Launches Open Source-Friendly Wireless Router
An anonymous reader submits news of Netgear's release of the "open source Wireless-G Router (model WGR614L), enabling Linux developers and enthusiasts to create firmware for specialized applications, and supported by a dedicated open source community. The router supports the most popular open source firmware; Tomato and DD-WRT are available on WGR614L, making it easier for users to develop a wide variety of applications. The router is targeted at people who want custom firmware on their router without worrying about issues, and enjoy the benefits of having an open source wireless router."
Here in 2008, I'm only interested in Free Software-friendly 802.11 N routers. Anybody know of any?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
It always seems that whenever a company releases something open-source they have to make at least one component proprietary. As this allows Open-WRT to be installed on it perhaps it is really open, but just about every device that uses something open-source has something that makes it hard to install something new on it or they don't use a 100% open source OS (examples, N800, EEE PC, TiVo, etc)
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Now we can use vastly superior ROT13 encryption instead of that lame WEP stuff.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
So they finally decided to stop handing the Linux tweakable router market to Linksys/Cisco, huh? Let's see, how long did that take?
According to Wikipedia, Linksys cut hardware back on their routers and released the hackable WRT54GL in 2005. So they've done nothing but ignore this market for nearly 4 years.
Took someone else long enough.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Netgear doesn't make money on firmware. They make money selling routers. So if this sells more routers, then fine. But don't look to them to start cannibalizing their sales of Super-G, MiMo or N routers to sell more older on the shelf gear. 614 routers are themselves, fairly old probably as old internally as Linksys open routers. All they did was tweak the gear slightly in light of cheaper hardware now vs 3 years ago.
BTW, I LOVED my 624v3 Super-G Netgear router, for the 12 months it lasted. Then last month the wireless piece of it conked out. I replaced it with an 824v2 with all internal diversity antennas so the fact that Netgear cheaped out and never built replaceable antenna couplings is moot.
The KWGR614 was the single worst router I have ever used. VPN, chat, P2P, and any other application that required other than port 80 never worked, it liked to drop connections for no reason, and has received not a single firmware update to date. At least Newegg was nice enough to give me my money back so I could buy a Linksys. The only success it achieved was setting the bar extremely low for this new open source offering.
and no gigabit ethernet? wake me up when I can get a netgear adsl wireless n+ router with fricking gigabit ethernet!
open source or not I'd buy it :(
Hasn't Buffalo been shipping routers running DD-WRT for the longest time? Shouldn't we be supporting the people who were doing it the longest?
And no monitor included? No printer function either?
I'm not going to buy this piece of shit.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Currently the wife's XP laptop will never drop off the wireless. If my Linux laptop is connect they will both drop about once a day. If I turn on my linux desktop which is wired in, the wireless laptops will drop out about once an hour.
Tomato is not really open source. It is open source except for the UI.
DD-WRT is just a branch of OpenWRT that costs money. It is free for home use however.
Use OpenWRt; It is open and free. If you want simplicity, use X-wrt, which is basically OpenWRT with a web based UI. It does not use the latest version of OpenWRT, but is very stable. It includes a smörgåsbord of modules to add with a simple mouse click.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
This is true, but there are modded Tomato firmwares floating about without Jon complaining. I've dontated to his project; I love Tomato. He deserves the right to keep control over the web ui, but I do agree that it detracts from making the firmware as free as it could be.
Hmmm... " !!!! Opening The Router Housing or Putting In Any Customer
Software on The Router Will Void The Warranty On Your
Router!!!!"
WGR614L Open Source Guide V2
What does it mean by open source anyway? Could I install OpenBSD on this thing? I thought broadcom was one of those difficult manufacturers whose stuff had to be reverse engineered because there are no specs? They came around?
only some parts - it still uses the precompiled, no-source-code Broadcom binary.
/. now. It's marketing more than anything.
It's also not new, so it's not clear why this is on
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
This page:
WGR614L really a WG614v9?
talks about it.
I removed his contact numbers and email address. They're on the page I linked to, and he really doesn't need a slashdot post of his vitals, he's got enough problems right now.
Nice to see Netgear's on the ball.
Apparently Netgear's guy responsible is personally taking care of the problem.
hanzie
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
Is this some kind of joke? What the hell do you need USB for? The only thing a wireless access point and router needs is 1) an input ethernet port, for connecting to your cable/DSL modem, 2) 4 output ethernet ports, for connecting to your wired machines (including printer), and 3) antennae for your wireless devices.
I do tend to agree with the other reply to this; any newer router needs gigabit ports on the output. It's pretty annoying that all my machines have GbE, but can only talk to each other at 100 Mb/s because of the router they're connected through (which admittedly is an older model). If Netgear or someone else released an open-source-friendly wireless router with 802.1n and GbE ports for the internal network, that would probably be attractive enough to me to decide to upgrade from my current D-Link. As it is, just being open-source-friendly isn't quite enough to get me to upgrade; as long as my current router works, I don't have much to complain about. Unfortunately, my D-Link barely works right: I'm unable to upgrade the firmware to the newer versions, because then it won't allow wirelessly-connected devices to access my JetDirect-connected HP printer. I've emailed D-Link about it and they don't care.
The specs on this thing is suspiciously similar to the good old WRT54GL. Unless the price is lower, I really don't see what this thing brings to the table.
If it had just included a couple USB ports and upped the ram/flash a little bit, it would have improved the hackability considerably. Look at what people have been able to do with the NSLU2. With these fairly minor changes the WGR614L could supersede both the 54GL and NSLU2.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
What the hell do you need USB for?
If it had 802.11n and a 4-port GigE switch I wouldn't complain, but the current hardware spec on this thing makes it just a clone of the good old wrt54gl. It is really nothing new or exciting at all, just a clone of a Linksys product.
Now, with some USB ports you can do all sorts of additional stuff. External harddisks. Printers. Scanners. NAS for your home network. uPnP media server. Network printer/scanner server. Look up all the things people have been using NSLU2s for and then imagine a device that has the capabilities of both the 54GL and the NSLU2.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
MOD PARENT UP. I wish I had points. I used to be a rabid fan of DD-WRT, and I still believe it is the best firmware out there for the WRT series routers. However, the project leader (Brainslayer) has recently started to close source certain parts of the project, and it seems he is working to make it unusable in open-source form (i.e. requires proprietary code to function at all). Basically, he's pulling a Sveasoft move here and screwing a great number of the people who donated time and money to make the system work in the first place.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
I don't personally, but some people use the USB port on their router to connect a PC to it, so they've been coming that way for years.
I think a more useful feature on this model would be to use a USB port to connect an external USB storage enclosure and turn it into a NAS as a bonus. With a Linux OS, that'd be pretty easy to configure.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Actually there is instructions on their website on how to solder a USB cable to the router. This is shown for recovery purposes.
http://www.myopenrouter.com/article/10341/Recover-Your-WGR614L-Using-a-Serial-Console-Windows/
Probably not exactly what you want but, its nice there is already instructions (in case) you brick it.
Baldric: Sir Bedevere, there is a flaw in the regular expression used to match 11b/g days. "Saturday" will match early, just "A Minute Past" the end of Friday, when we decide which standard is more standard for the day.
Sir Bedevere: Can we use XML?
Baldric: I have a cunning plan. We will use UTF-8, and have our system include SÃturday, instead of Saturday, so that there won't be any ASCII 97 characters except in the penultimate position.
Sir Bedevere: Recall, Baldric, that I hired you away from Edmund Blackadder not to solve problems, but to maintain them. Your fix can go in, but you have to make sure that it ripples through the system and triggers at least twice as many problems, or we won't consume all our FTE.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I bought a Buffalo wifi router a couple years ago, when Worst Buy has them on clearance for $39. It runs stock firmware, which identifies itself as BSD based. The thing works flawlessly. I wish I had a couple more of them.
About fucking time. Now only if they get some USB dongles out too that have drivers Linux compatible that don't use two to three different chipsets under the same product name. My WG111v2 works great on XP but is terribly hard to get a consistent connection on linux with no open-source drivers (Ubuntu works out of the box but will drop if too many packets come through at a time or something. Seems whenever I do anything data intensive it gets angry with me.)
I think they're just acknowledging that they can't write firmware to save their lives. I had a WG602 that would always lock up after a few days of use; the lockups would happen sooner after big ftp/scp sessions. Basically the damn thing had a memory leak. Updating to the latest firmware didn't help; I finally replaced it with a Linksys.
(Oh yeah, and they also promised upgradability to 802.1x WPA when I bought it, and never released a firmware update with WPA support.) AFA I'm concerned, this is the smartest decision they could possibly make. Now they don't have to bother with fake promises of future firmware upgrades, they can just leave it to their customers to upgrade at will. And people buying these routers won't have to put up with buggy firmware without any recourse.
Of course I still think it's too late; I've completely sworn off ever buying Netgear again and have stuck to Linksys...
-- *My* journal is more interesting than *yours*...
Cheers, Ed
That's a serial console. The fact that USB was involved is just a coincidence.
The below contact info was posted by an AC whom I believe to be the Netgear gentleman in question.
Here it is again (because lots of folks will never see an AC post)
Mr. Choudhury, I recommend registering for an account here and posting. If you don't, someone else will.
Thank you very much for proactively working to fix the problem. It gives me confidence that your company's equipment might be worth trying.
hanzie.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
Easy enough to configure, but sure to max-out the low-speed CPU in the router instantly.
Packetizing data at full 100Mbps uses serious CPU time, which this box doesn't have. And if you want any kind of security for the data, like SFTP accesses, just forget the whole thing.
If you want a SAN, grab an old computer. Don't try to force a router into a file server role.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
For just a moment, don't think of it as a router. Think of it as a low-power-consumption custom Linux server with a certain amount of RAM and a certain amount of flash storage. Now think about other options for such a device -- perhaps as a SAMBA file server or a CUPS print server. I'd even like to see it with an audio output so I could hook it to a stereo ala Apple's Aiport Express -- I'm sure someone would soon have a pretty good UPnP media server software project well underway -- but if they don't want to build audio in USB would at least leave it open as an option.
Apple's got several successful products (Time Capsule & Airport Express) that exist in the "wireless access point plus more" realm. A moderately-priced decent-build-quality piece of hardware with fair extension capabilities via open-source firmware has some pretty fascinating potential.
Hahahaha, you think a multi-hundred mhz cpu can't saturate a 100Mb line, I did it with a 66Mhz pentium. Also you save a TON on power by using a low power device like these as a low volume file server. I wouldn't hang an entire office off one, but they have more horesepower than most of the fileservers had when I started in the industry, and we made those work somehow =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Look into uPnP (universal plug and play/pray). It's horribly insecure both from a design standpoint and from the standpoint of most of the real world code being horribly sloppy, but it exists and is fairly well supported for opening up the required ports for applications from Windows. I personally turn it off on both the router and the client because it's been the source of TONS of critical security vulnerabilities.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Well, considering it's possible, but not likely, to brick a router when flashing I'd say they really can't support it officially via warranty.
As far as I know, Linksys at some point back was forced to comply with the GPL and release their Linux firmware. Inside the firmware is a binary kernel driver, like Nvidia, that enables support with the wireless aspect of the chipset. No source code is available for this.
All of the open source firmwares for these routers are based on the orignal Linksys source AFAIK.
Apple airport extreme supports IPv6, and has gige built in.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The problem I have with my WRT54G hardware version 4 is the lack of storage space. It has 4MB of flash memory for the system files as well as for storing my photos and webpages.
I can see how this can be a problem. Not to mention that it probably won't be enough to run Duke Nukem Forever when it comes out.
Oh, wait, it's a router, not a NAS or a terminal server !
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
I believe there are a handful of consumer routers out there that can also use their USB port as a printer server, which could be handy.