Sunday, September 18, 2005

Tweaking Linksys Router's Firmware

I just bought a Linksys wireless router WRT45GS. It is a wireless broadband router with speedbooster. According to the box, the speedbooster feature might boost speed up to 35%.
I buy this router because I want to make another 'wireless island' at home, and also because my phone cable that is going to the DSL modem has been severely degraded (when I check it, there is the insulator was torn, so the wires were almost broken). Why I use long phone cable to connect to my DSL modem? That's because there is no phone jack in the room where I put my desktop computers (which use CAT5 wires to connect to the router).

I bought the modem from Best Buy, which gave $20 rebate. Not bad for such a 54 Mbps wireless router, I said. But when I tried to configure it, I could not find anything on the web menu saying that the router is able to connect to another router via wireless connection. I was so dissapointed. I then went to the Internet and searched for information about this 'wireless bridging'. There are some hits, many links pointed me to the hardwares (such as Linksys Wireless Bridge). But this is not what I want!

After spent some more time to refine the search keyword, I eventually ended up to some discussion websites. Interestingly, these discussions mention about to upgrade the Linksys official firmware to the modified one! After going go Linksys website, I found out that for many of their products, they also provide the GPL source code for their products. Amazing! This modified firmware supports a feature called "WDS" (don't remember the abbrs., but is is something like wireless client).

The following links are few of them that have the information/and firmwares:

http://www.hyperwrt.org/

www.dd-wrt.com

http://sourceforge.net/projects/wifi-box

http://www.linksysinfo.org

http://wrt54g.thermoman.de/



Some of them require free subscription.

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