Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Have a home router you wish could do a little bit more?

In keeping the theme from the last post, this site is a Godsend for those of us that like to tweak the network to get a little bit more juice.  DD-WRT started out as a firmware upgrade to a Linksys router and has since branched out to other vendors as well.  It is free, as almost all things I tend to post about, and typically opens functions that the hardware is fully capable of performing but the vendor's firmware and GUI does not activate or at times even show.  For example, a lot of devices are capable of VPN tunnelling.  This is reserved for the business and more expensive units that a typical vendor sells but the consumer hardware uses the same hardware as the business one so it is simply a matter of having the code to utilize the imbedded function.

BEWARE, as with the music player, you can damage your unit if you do not follow the instructions or upload corrupted firmware.  If the router in question is your bread and butter connection, I would take every precaution before looking to perform this change.  On the other hand, I naturally encourage you to try it with the caveat of knowing you may need to buy a new router in the worst case scenario.  Really though, the danger is no worst than upgrading the firmware supplied by the vendor.

Enjoy.

DD-WRT :: News

1 comment:

Skibum said...

My new Dlink 628 is not on the list but then that might be because it by default has a lot functinality not usually available on a home router. Best money I spent lately!