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Teach Your Router New Tricks With DD-WRT
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Serdar Yegulalp offers an in-depth look at DD-WRT, open source router firmware that can 'breath new life — and advanced features — into your old wired or wireless router.' Quality-of-service controls, iptables-based firewall, IPv6 support, DNS controls, Kai Daemon for allowing game console network tunneling, and a host of features for using your router as a public-access hotspot are among the many possibilities for hacking your router with DD-WRT."
welcome to 5 years ago dipshits
The project seems to be drive by egomaniacs. Hardware support is it's only strength.
I can't get more than 1.3 mib/s on it cause of a bug in the pppoe daemon and that's just my issue. There's plenty more they chose to do nothing about.
Tomato or open wrt seem like better options , too bad i can't run either on my router.
Fuck dd-wrt. Hasn't everyone switched over to openwrt or tomato these days?
it would be nice if they had a release with openswan or some other ipsec server/client option.
I just installed it for the first time on my router yesterday (linksys e2000.) Easy to install and it's working well. Good QOS is nearly mandatory in my house.
Since when has dd-wrt been "Open Source?" It's very much closed-source. OpenWRT is actually open source, as in, you can download the code, modify, and compile it yourself. dd-wrt is closed, and often includes proprietary drivers.
You can also enable rflow (which appears to match NetFlow v5) on DD-WRT routers, so you can find out who's hogging the bandwidth.
This is old news, also DDWRT is a closed source solution that for some routers you have to pay for features. Openwrt has much more for the price and if something is wrong you can fix the bug yourself.
I used DD-WRT for some time, but if you want QOS bandwith managment for games (which was what I was really after), you have to buy your way into the forum where a premium version can be downloaded.
Anyway, after some more looking I found 'Tomato' which fitted what I was looking for a lot better. Feel free to try it for yourself.
http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato
They haven't released a new stable version in over three years. I thought development had stopped.
Keep in mind, DD-WRT is great, but if your router has crappy hardware in the first place, it won't magically give you everything you could want in a router. Make sure you check the DD-WRT HCL for your router model before you try installing it.
OpenWRT is soooooo much better, to the point that you will frequently find people grabbing opkgs from OpenWRT to install to their DD-WRT image.
Say no to idiocy, just use OpenWRT. (plus LuCI is much sexier nowadays)
I just wanted a wireless repeater that I could plug in, configure a few things, and extend the range of my home wi-fi to include the second floor. I installed dd-wrt on my linksys router, configured it, and everything worked well... for a short time. Now, my wife complains that every time she turns on her laptop she has to unplug the router and plug it back in. What a hunk of junk.
I wish to use my router as a simple webserver. We already have router connected 24/7, so why do we have to pay few bucks a month for hosting some web pages?
Even better than stock Tomato (who's GUI and features are awesome) is TomatoVPN that includes a build of OpenVPN!
I tried using ddwrt but it caused streaming video problems and frequent connection hangups and disconnects with steam games. I found their community very unhelpful, when I inquired about my issues and explained my setup and questioned if my network was set up correctly my post was immediately closed without a response or reason. Apparently others have had this issue as well, I tried many build with no success, eventually installed tomato and all problems disappeared.
When there are all these good firmwares around, why do so many companies stick with their shitty proprietary ones?
(Also applies to cheap NAS boxes; I just bought one where half the text was translated terribly from chinese, and the other half not at all -- with the aid of google translate I eventually figured out that to edit a user's password I had to click "Clam Party"... would just sticking freenas on it be so hard? :( )
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
The dude that runs this project is a douche. Don't support it. I attempted to build his stuff from scratch to see if it's even possible . Build scripts were poorly documented, and I knew after I had downloaded like 8GB of source that something was fishy.
It may work for you - but this guy does very little to help openwrt.
Please use openwrt - or x-wrt.
--Adrian
I looked into a Buffalo router that comes with DD-WRT preinstalled and Buffalo tech support. But the latest firmware is almost 2 years old. Surely there's been bugs and vulnerabilities in it found since then, but no patches.
--
make install -not war
into a brick.
Which, interestingly enough, was an improvement. WiFi is from the devil.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
Props for being the first to have custom firmware for the Linksys WRT54G but talking about earning the right to be the poster boy for "complete fucking asshole".
Heard you're broke - sucks to be you.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
DD-WRT routes your TEACHER!
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
Which FOSS router OS/SW can I use to replace what's installed on an Astaro router? I stopped paying for the annual license so it stopped working, but the HW is just fine. Twin WAN, firewall, antivirus, internal VLANs, VPN... but closed and locked down. I'd still pay to subscribe to patches, but not on something that just disconnects from the networks when I'm late.
--
make install -not war
Leave it to InfoWeek to be both completely confused and 5 years behind the times.
To wit, this article with the same premise from Lifehacker in 2006. And that was before DD-WRT sucked.
First, the author's router is not "an old router". In fact, it ships with DD-WRT. Take an old WRT-54G 1.0 and stick DD-WRT and that would be breathing life into an old router. All you're doing here is using a Buffalo-preconfigured (and encrypted, closed-source) version of DD-WRT.
But more to the point...DD-WRT? Ick. If you want QoS (as the author seems to), you need pay for the commercial version. The QoS in the free version is known broken and has been for quite a while, and there is little motivation to fix it. Also, old routers cannot use the QoS, because you need 4MB or bigger flash. Maybe it works in newer routers but who cares - there are plenty of better alternatives to DD-WRT.
Finally, for Slashdotters, let me say two words that will have you running screaming from DD-WRT: software activation.
Tomato is a fine, free (in all senses) alternative, and I personally love the Tomato-USB version.
Advice: on VPS providers
Thanks for the link! I've been looking for something like this for a long time, but... Sorry, I can't go on with that anymore. Even my brother has installed dd-wrt, and he knows almost nothing at all about computers. Now, if someone could possibly direct me to a browser other than Internet Explorer. Surely someone is working on it, right?
DD-WRT isn't open source, as others have indicated. They don't respect the licenses their code comes with, apparently.
Also "breath new life"? *BREATHE*.
I always look at DD-WRT vs OpenWRT like this: DD-WRT is like an improved stock firmware. Sure, it has lots of features that probably aren't available in the preload, but it still just feels like a manufacturer firmware. OpenWRT, on the other hand, lets you go 100% CLI (it didn't even come with a web interface until a few releases ago). In general, if you could do it with a plain old linux box, you can do it just as easily on OpenWRT. For example: I look in /etc/config. In OpenWRT I see human readable, easy to edit config files. In DD-WRT, I see obfuscated things.
I used DD-WRT for years on an old Linksys WRT54GS (I think that's the model) router and it worked great for me. But after upgrading my internet to 100 Mbps I found out it pukes out at around 20.5 Mbps or something like that, haha. Almost wanted to swear at my ISP, and then decided to try plugging straight into the new Cisco modem/router they gave me, and found all the bandwidth I was paying for was there after all. Haha. But plug back into the Linksys and it chokes me back to just over 20 Mbps again. Couldn't believe it.
Tomato totally rocks as long as you need basic router features (and by basic I mean, compared to DD-WRT, it still offers far more features than those that come with stock firmware). I bought an Asus RT-N16 and got tired of its stock firmware - crappy connection, never saw uptime of more than 4 days. Replaced it with Tomato about three months ago and haven't rebooted the router since then. It has all the features I need - mac filtering, vpn tunneling, UPnP, NAS, QoS.
I have a cheap router with an Atheros radio. DD-WRT did not deal with it well at all, with the WiFi connection dropping & very unstable. The router works beautifully using OpenWRT - WiFi included. DD-WRT probably works great with a Broadcom radio 'cause that's where it was born but my Atheros radio router likes OpenWRT much better.
DD-WRT is not open source at all. Cisco (and others) are openly advertising it in the product features on shopping sites. In addition, not too long before said advertising began, router manufacturers cut the internal memory in half (from 4 MB to 2 MB) so that only DD-WRT and Tomato would run on said routers. So all of a sudden people had a "free geeky upgrade" for their routers that costs them extra money for the "full" version.
In fact, during my testing, DD-WRT was less functional in some areas than base Linksys firmware - so much so that I got rid of the whole router.
If you want a truly open sourced firmware, check into Gargoyle. Just make sure you have one of the older routers from the days when the companies weren't trying to outright scam their customers.
I have nothing to do with any authors or developers but have had a pretty good experience with DD-WRT.
I bought an ASUS RT-N16 on sale some time ago:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833320038
I liked the speed specs and also the USB ports -- I wanted to set up a network printer. The firmware that came with this router was GARBAGE. I mean totally, utterly, completely USELESS. My internet connection would constantly drop, forget about printing or NAS. I downloaded a particular build of DD-WRT and installed it and the router suddenly did everything it was supposed to. It stays up and running for months at a time. I'm really glad I found it.
It's also nice to hear about Tomato and Open WRT. I'll look into those when I need to get my next router -- which I shouldn't need for a good long time.
Yep, Tomato VPN is fantastic. I've been running on an ASUS router for quite a while now.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
My experience with DD-WRT for the WRT54GL has been less than optimal. After much tinkering it's stable with the features I want, but it took quite some effort.
If you're considering installing DD-WRT, know that there's a good chance that the "stable" version listed on the main site is probably not your best bet, nor is whatever the router database suggests. Instead, hit up the forums, find the relevant forum for your hardware, read all the way through the sticky posts marked "READ ME" (in the case of WRT54GL the "peacock thread") and if you still feel like going for it, then by all means do.
I had to switch to the kernel 2.4 firmware for my WRTSL54GS. The broadcom driver in 2.6 doesn't autonegotiate right with my admittedly old and crappy DSL modem and results in absolutely terrible performance.
how is this news ? DD-WRT has been out forever... so others like openwrt, tomato.
The summary says dd-wrt will "breath new life" into my router. Breath is a noun, breathe is a verb. God. Damn.
are you saying that steve jobs is a douche?
I use dd-wrt on my cisco router, and it is far superior to the previous cisco firmware. Though I am humbled to learn that I went for dd-wrt when open-wrt was sitting right beside it. A look at the wikipedia article indicates that dd-wrt is still under GPL, but tonight I know what I'll be doing; I'll be changing to tomato or open-wrt. A word on the /. article: I am quite surprised at the "hostile" reactions; the concept of tweaking a router with open-source firmware is a fantastic one, and I can easily pardon a small error. Minus the venom, I am grateful to /. and the /. community for (harshly) furthering my education. Now, onto that 30/30/30 process once again. Thanks /., and angry geniuses!
Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made. - Otto von Bismarck
Tried this on my Porter Cable, it just didn't work...
I live in a very crowded part of town with 9+ wifi hotspots in my area. I'd really like a firmware I could hack in and flash on all the local routers that would provide bandwidth sharing for everybody. I could go around and knock and ask politely before doing this, but I'd much rather just bust in robin hood style, crack the WEP using my little Linux Mint netbook, and change the firmware so that all the routers shared internet bandwidth without the end user really noticing. Except of course when their internet doubles or triples in speed!
Is there a firm ware project or suite out there with this capability, or do I need to start one on Google Code?
This:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/042706-sharing-wi-fi.html
Is what I had in mind, but doing it hacker style without the neighbors knowledge or consent.
I'd love to get it all in place on my whole block, then casually stroll by and say, "Have you noticed your internet is quite a bit faster?".
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Anyone who knows about DD-WRT (and its brethren like Tomato and OpenWrt) doesn't need to read some lame article about it, and those who DIDNT already know about it, aren't well served by a chimped-out Slashvertisement.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Not exactly "news", both dd-wrt and truly open source open-wrt has been out outperforming stock firmwares for 5+++ years
I just installed it tonight on and old Netgear WG602 v3 I wanted to make a client instead of using my USB WiFi stick. The GUI is nice with tons of features.
"Is that real poncho or a Sears poncho?" ~~FZ
Firmware is already a collective plural -- like software, hardware, and clothing. You don't have "two softwares" or "two clothings" -- you have two pieces of software, or two items of clothing. Likewise, you should write: "When there are all these good firmware packages around..." Also, swearing is impolite. Good points, though.
Why is this a front-page Slashdot article? It's ancient tech, closed source, and there's no mention of the vastly superior alternatives out there.
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
TomatoVPN has unfortunately not been maintained since January 2010
Tomato itself, with a latest version of 1.28, was last updated June 2010 (according to it's Wikipedia entry)
The "CPU" that is used in that device won't actually go much beyond 20mbit. It just simply can't handle faster streams, especially if you're using NAT on your internal network. NAT adds a bunch of overhead. Supposedly the GL can go up to 30mbit as it has a newer processor.
The WAN Port on a WRT54GS is 10M. You need at least a E3000/610N with a gigabit WAN port.
I am still using the latest stock firmware. It works fine for me, but I don't want to have to keep upgrading and reconfiguring. So which ones are the stable, simple, etc.? I don't want to have to fiddle with frequent upgrades, reconfigurations, etc.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Very few consumer routers can handle 100 Mbps throughput across the NAT (well, technically PAT) layer. They simply don't have the CPU power, bus speed, and memory required. I would be interested to know what routers are capable of such speeds and are compatible with the likes of OpenWRT.
If I remember correctly the WRT54x series shares the internal and external NIC bandwidth and technically, the hardware is only capable of 50mbit throughput. I had the same router with DDWRT(overclocked the CPU) and it capped out at ~35Mbps. I had to buy a new router to utilize the bandwidth of my 100Mbps connection(e3000 with DD-WRT). The issue is the hardware not DD-WRT.
But after upgrading my internet to 100 Mbps I found out it pukes out at around 20.5 Mbps
My heart bleeds for you...
Get a mikrotik box and you can push nearly 100Mbps over a good 802.11n connection.
Hasn't the Kai support been broken for a while now?
"If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet"
From what I've seen, IPv6 support on both of these is pretty primitive, and behind the latest specification (one of these still uses the deprecated IPv4-compatible addresses. IMO, any new networking gear that one gets ought to support IPv6, so from that standpoint, the fact that these 2 don't is very unsatisfactory.
...PPTP/VPN (server) is disabled in DD-WRT. That pretty much chokes it.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Last I checked, IPv6 wasn't working properly with the most recent versions of DD-WRT. I recently set up OpenWRT on my Linksys WRT54GL however the 2.6 kernel version doesn't support the wireless correctly, although from what I've read they are making progress on that.
Where you running the Linksys in wireless bridge mode?
Get OpenWRT for it (backfire) and youy won't look back. We still have ~300 out in the field with OpenWRT.
Use "Tomato RAF" with Linux kernel 2.4.x.
That has 70Mbps guaranteed throughput.
Good luck with IPv6 without ip6tables...
The wnr3500 comes close, but I think there are models that can do this. I get maybe 70-80Mbps, but not much more. It is good enough for me though.
There were builds of tomato floating around with something called "fastnat" which enabled much greater speeds, but sacrificing features. They never seemed to catch on though.
Is there an easy-to-use router package with a whitelist feature?
It would be nice if it had an easy workflow. I.e., instead of editing a whitelist file, you'd have something like:
-user tries to visit an un-whitelisted site.
-the site is automatically added to a "request" list, optionally with a comment from the user
-admin is presented with the request list in a web interface and approves the ones he wants to
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I have a netgear WNDR3700 at home. Works great with with OpenWRT, 5GHz performance isn't great but 2.4GHz is much better than my old WRT54G.
It can handle somewhere between 100-200Mbit/s through iptables NAT (I benchmarked it, but don't remember the result offhand).
Well, this might get you started :
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/router-charts/view
The Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH works for me, with openwrt firmware that is. The default firmware is some kind of modified dd-wrt which has an awful "buffalo" interface and kept dropping packets. I tried dd-wrt as well but that gave the same problem with the choked bandwidth (in contrast with the buffalo firmware), the openwrt firmware is pretty easy to set up on this router and works perfectly for me, allowing the full use of my 120 mbit connection.
I've done quite a lot of research into this, and you'll be better off using something like m0n0wall on a compact pc. Router hardware that can support 100mbps NAT is likely to be running Cisco IOS :)
Well the router in my appartment doesn't seem to have any problem with 100 Mbps full duplex, however I have no control over that router so I need something to put between it and my boxes. It also doesn't have any wifi, so I have an old 10 Mbps router connected to one of the ports. So what I'm trying to say is: I second the above question. Anyone have some good suggestions for OpenWRT compatible consumer level routers that handle 100 Mbps and wi-fi ?
My biggest issue is trying to find a router can that run DD-WRT/Tomato/etc, is trying to find a router that can handle 400mpbs+ of WAN LAN Performance.
Are there any high performance routers that support open source?
This actually has everything to do with wireless and not specifically the WRT54GS or DD-WRT. That device supports 802.11g wireless, which allows up to a 54Mbps data rate. That data rate is NOT throughput. For almost every wireless frame sent, there is an acknowledgement frame sent. That, in and of itself, cuts the potential bandwidth in half. Then, there's other protocol overhead at work as well. At most, you would see 24-25Mbps of actual throughput. And that would be if there were no other devices using close to the same channel (including microwaves and cordless phones) and you were close to the AP.
If you want the throughput, you would need to go to 802.11n with at least a 2x2:2 antenna array, since you can get up to 180-200Mbps of throughput (max). And, that's if your client (laptop, smartphone, etc.) also can do the same.
I've been using Tomato on my WRTGL v1.1 For at least two years now, and It was very much install, configure, forget. QoS works great, and it manages my 40mbps connection with some trouble. (notably, It piles up if you saturate the link at 40mbps for a few days requiring a 30-30-30 reset) Even so, it's infinitely better than the stock firmware.
But does it allow say a wifi router to go from being a wifi g and b to to a wifi n as well?
If it does, then I would pay for that for sure, instead of buying new stuff, just reuse the old one with the firmware update and voila no more junk in the garbage dumps that could be recycled, so to speak.
Butt plug back into the Linksys and it chokes me
This violates the TOS. and voids your warrantee
Ah. Did you ever had that problem with the stock firmware?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I have a WRT54G v.2 or 4, can't remember which and can't check right now. I've been running Tomato on it for years. I have the same exact story, i get 30Mbit down when hooked directly into the cable company's gear (I should be getting 40), but can't squeeze anything more than 20Mbit through my router.
Yup, I have FIOS and ended up switching to the Verizon-provided router for this reason. The biggest issue with it is the NAT table is limited, but I think I've mostly worked through that.
You can potentially put the router into more of a bridging mode and use your own router (which obviously has to be decent), but that is pretty tricky due to how the whole setup (internet+cable) works.
Cisco has the 800 series routers which are not to be confused with their Cisco/Linksys line. They come with full IOS capability and have enterprise grade features and functionality. Meant for test labs or small enterprise use.
Also, the Apple Airport Extreme is a very capable router, both in terms of dual channel N wireless and high end processor speed, etc.
Neither are compatible with open source firmware, but they are both sub $300 routers which will handle enterprise level bandwidth.
Put it on a UPS while flashing so it won't get bricked. Unless you upload the wrong firmware there's nothing else to worry about.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Very few consumer routers can handle 100 Mbps throughput across the NAT (well, technically PAT) layer. They simply don't have the CPU power, bus speed, and memory required. I would be interested to know what routers are capable of such speeds and are compatible with the likes of OpenWRT.
That same question was asked recently:
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/11/09/19/0315258/ask-slashdot-good-gigabit-80211n-home-router
I have used DD-WRT, but from what I can tell, the firmware is built from Open-WRT. The problem I had with DD-WRT is that it is mostly proprietary. Also, the build trees they use from OpenWRT were usually bad so you had crappy wireless drivers most of the time for lots of different chipsets. Perhaps with the exception of the truly ancient BCM chipsets in their WRT54GL implementations of DD-WRT. Those ran pretty well.
But, if you truly want a decent piece of software for doing wireless, I would suggest you check out OpenWRT. Secondly, get a AR7161/AR9283 based wireless hardware model. I would suggest the Buffalo wireless units. They work pretty well. These devices made by Atheros are all very open source friendly so you get a piece of hardware the developers don't have to fight with the manufacturer about intellectual property crapola.
(Which, in my view is what intellectual property is nothing but people who want to own everything and have other sociaopathic and psychopathic tendencies.)
The OpenWRT build system is pretty good too. You can concentrate on the software instead of fighting the build system.
But I stopped using DD-WRT a long time ago. It just isn't a good solution for wireless N and the authors do not appear to be very Linuxl aware. (Although, they are very good at writing javascript to create a nice interface in the browser and just copying whatever build tree from OpenWRT that is the flavor of the day.)
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
There have been some guys working on CeroWRT to try to get buffer bloat down to a minimum. http://www.bufferbloat.net/news/19
I don't know about 100mbps but I have a Linksys WRT160N running dd-wrt and it happily saturates my 50/50mbps FIOS line. Cost something like $30 as a refurb.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
I was only dealing with wired connections, but no.
Wasn't dealing with wireless. The wired connections were being choked down to ~20 Mbps. The annoying thing is, the firmware the ISP provides on the Cisco DPC 3825 (or the device itself?) makes it so wireless connections cannot see any of the wired connections. So things like controlling an iTunes box via my iPhone and the wireless connection were impossible, because the devices couldn't see each other. This was the only reason I tried to keep my Linksys box connected as before. But now I've worked around that by connecting the Linksys to the Cisco via one of the regular connections, and ignoring the WAN connector on the Linksys, and now Linksys wireless clients can see the wired clients just fine, heh. Stupid ISP. "But can your wireless clients connect to the internet? They can? OK, that's all we care about. Any other issues I can help you with?" heh.
Yeah, this doesn't surprise me. It is pretty old consumer gear now.
Thanks for that link!
the same problem, yes, which leads me to believe it's a hardware fault, which is Why I still applaud the tomato firmware, as it provides me with more features.
I spent hours and hours trying to get OpenVPN to work between two DD-WRT-flashed Linksys routers, and could never get it to work right. I am convinced there's something not quite right in the implementation.
Also, I bricked one of those routers when I tried to flash it back to the stock OS. I would probably investigate Tomato "next time".