I’ve been using a WRT-54GL with Tomato firmware for a while now, and it’s great! I wouldn’t go back to the stock firmware when the open-source ones (including Tomato, DD-WRT and OpenWRT) are all awesome. 
Previous to my curren router I used a WRT-54G with DD-WRT. It worked fairly well for about 3 years. I had problems peaking out my 12mb while using QoS, and got tired of having to reset it every week. I like the DD-WRT for all of its abilities, but I decided that spending time figuring out a router isn’t how I want to spend my time.
So for the price, performance, concurrency and FULL firewall features, I don’t think you can get much better then a Sonicwall TZ 100 for $250 (~$300 w/wireless). Sure it’s not open source, but allowing 6,000 concurrent users and up to 100mb internet connections, I seriously doubt I’ll have any internet issues as connection speeds increase over the next 5 years or so. With perfect QoS and full NAT/PAT it just blows anything cheaper than it out of the water.
Jeff have fun with DD-WRT, I know I did… well for a while.
Jeff,
Is it possible to hard limit wireless traffic using this firmware?
In other words, all wireless has a maximum of 100k up and 500k down traffic, if the available bandwidth is 3.5mb/s Essentially I would like to have an asynchronous “lower teir” for any wireless users.
This is something I have been wanting to do for a very long time on my network but can’t because the linksys firmware has no options for this.
Thanks.
My main problem, no matter which router I’ve used, has been heating.
I had a desktop with a wired connection to the router, and then the comcast cable modem, and the router offered wireless access to my original xbox downstairs.
I never got it to work perfectly, because the router’s and modems always got really hot.
I can not put the router in the downstairs, where the air conditioning is, because then I really prefer to have a direct wired connection for the desktop pc, which I have upstairs.
I still have a bunch of unused router’s, and I usually have to turn off my cable modem every night, even though I live in 1 of the coldest states in the USA.
I have long heard that cable modems are meant to be highly undurable.
I wonder what you guys think?
Just bought the same box. Do you lose the USB port and/or torrent server/file sharing with DD-WRT?
I have a Linksys WRT54GL, the model Linksys released to support third-party Linux firmware in 2005. Works great, 188 days of uptime at the moment and I think I only shut it down then because I was moving it.
I had OpenWRT on it at first, but when the excitement of the tiny Linux box died down I switched to DD-WRT because it had a better web UI and needed less fiddling.
My favorite thing about it is the ability to set up rate-limiting on the firewall to make brute-force attacks difficult. Here’s how you do it:
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Preventing_Brute_Force_Attacks
If that router is the WZR-HP-G300NH, you can get an “official” dd-wrt build directly from Buffalo. Check it out.
I’ve been using an old WRT54G v4 with DD-WRT at home for a while now, and I love it. I’m planning on eventually setting one up at work as well so I can add a PXE server to the mix. Our current router at work doesn’t support FOSS firmware, and of course it doesn’t let you feed options to dhcpd.
I futzed about with various SoHo routers and 3rd party firmwares trying to get IPv6 on my home network, and discovered that only D-Link seems to have any support for IPv6, but 1) the router advertisements are broken, so autoconfiguration never worked right, 2) there is no filtering support for IPv6 whatsoever, and 3) it uses a TCPMSS rule in iptables which can’t be turned off, breaking PMTU and causing frustratingly random TCP resets on random sites on every Linux machine in the house (which, you know, expect the network to freaking work properly).
Most of the other firmwares, including essentially all of the 3rd party ones do not have any IPv6 support at all. Well, with the possible exception of OpenWRT, which is interesting but also much pickier about it’s hardware. I simply did not have the patience to research, find, and buy some supported hardware, and then hope I don’t brick it.
So I bought a Juniper SRX210 for a song on eBay and taught myself JUNOS. Real traffic control, real flow-based filtering on v4 and v6–all the nice grown-up features.
I can’t tell you how nice it is to have a “real” router that doesn’t do nasty hacks like brain-dead TCP MSS mangling and other such chicanery that manufacturers seem to think is “okay” on home networks, since well, “it works with Windows so who cares if it’s flagrantly broken?”
I will admit that interest in learning JUNOS was probably a not-insignificant part of that decision, but that’s probably obvious: anyone who runs a Juniper box for their home network is probably a de-facto uber-geek
Did you get extended range on your router? I purchased one, put DD-WRT onto it and I get less range than I did with my ancient Belkin pre-N device. Looking on the forums, it appears DD-WRT doesn’t know how to turn on the amplifier inside the WZR-HP-G300NH.
I’ve started to see old routers pop up in Goodwill stores now too. I keep the DD-wrt “compatible router wiki” bookmarked on my phone, and look to see if the routers for sale for $5-$8 are compatible.
dd-wrt has an infrastructure mode that lets you use these additional routers as repeaters. Considering a $80 repeater to perfect the coverage in your home (or with your neighbors) sounds like something to consider, but to do it for $5? That’s not a decision at all, that’s easy.
“I concur”. DD-WRT is very, very good. I haven’t upgraded my Linksys WRT-54G hardware (now 8years old!!) as the DD-WRT firmware is so good that my router does the job. And its now a bit of a classic piece of kit too. I should have blogged about it ages ago, as you have done.
Actually, I don’t need a router.
Jeff said: “the last major firmware update for it was a year and a half ago”
So?
Is there a bug in the old firmware you need fixed?
No?
Then what’s the point of an update? Updates for updates’ sake?
(Contra MJ, many things don’t need to be “improved”, especially at the cost of stability. A router that does everything it needs to is a finished product, and calling it that is not “laziness”, but realism. Some of us, for instance, have better things to do than waste time trying to make an 802.11g router useful in an 802.11n world.
Really, the WRT-54G was a great product. In 2004.)
(I’m glad you’re happy with dd-wrt, Jeff, but looking at the docs on eg. how to set up repeating makes me glad I went with a Time Capsule and AirPort Extreme setup.
That and the automatic discovery, etc., which makes the latter solution much more appropriate to the “mainstream” market.
The cheaper Buffalo is nice if all you have is N hardware running in 5 ghz; if you have any mixed-mode stuff [eg. various gaming hardware that doesn’t do N, or old hard-to-upgrade laptops like ones with a firmware whitelist for the wireless cards] the dual-band option is really worthwhile, since you can get both fast 5ghz connections on the N network and still use your G stuff. Without collision, even.
And when you’re already buying a dual-band router, suddenly that Apple stuff doesn’t look as expensive…)
I’ve been looking for a router to replace my trusty WRT54GS, which has been cruising along for at least four years running either DD-WRT or OpenWRT. On Jeff’s recommendation, I ordered the Buffalo router featured here.
It sucks.
Both the stock firmware and the DD-WRT firmware “freeze” every 30 seconds or so. The UI isn’t responsive and it won’t pass traffic. I’ve tried resetting it and reloading the firmware. No go. I’m sending it back.
A few months ago I tried to use the WRT160NL, but the same problem popped up. It needed to be rebooted every few days, which is unacceptable. (Unsurprisingly, the folks on the support forums think resetting the router every day is perfectly OK.)
I’m so tempted to just order a business-class 802.11n access point and disable the radio on the WRT54GS.
@Learn Violin & Bobby D:
I see we have a new form of spammer…
@Justin Hart:
I’m thinking about buying one of the Buffalo routers. I was going to through Amazon (I have an Amazon Prime trial account until August 2011), but they ran out of this model… and now link to their affiliate buy.com, which costs quite a bit more.
I may get one from NewEgg, simply because it’s the same price as Amazon was ($69.99 USD), and looks like it also has free shipping… just not 2-day.
P.S. Am I the only one who hates the layout change NewEgg made earlier this year? The page is 3 times longer than before and has relocated some of the useful information down the page.
When someone asks me which router to buy I always recommend WRT54GL. It is affordable and the most important, it runs Linux. Then I say put Tomato on it.
And remember, there are also modified versions of Tomato:
http://tomatovpn.keithmoyer.com/
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=19f5a2ee1929229a91b20cc0d07ba4d2edfe124112ee1386
I was looking into the whole DD-WRT thing, but one concern I have is SmallNetBuilder’s review of a NETGEAR WNR3500L with DD-WRT which concluded that routing performance takes a serious hit (70% lower) when running DD-WRT when compared to the stock firmware.
It was interesting that Jeff suggested that he experienced significant performance gains over his previous router (the DGL-4500). I totally buy the additional features argument, but the performance numbers apparently aren’t so great.
Pleased to see that Atwood uses the same router as me.
I tried running the DD-WRT distribution for a while, as I’d had good results with it for past routers. But I found it was flakey with this router. Some client machines would have their throughput stalled while others worked, strange restarts, etc.
I switched to the latest Buffalo firmware (the “official DD-WRT” version) and I miss some of the extra features which are lacking from that version, and the UI is a tragedy, but it’s at least very stable.