My impressions of various third-party WRT54G firmware

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.internet.wireless (More info?)

(I've also posted this to wrt54g@yahoogroups.com and Slashdot.)

I've had a WRT54g v2 since February, and have tried several
third-party firmware offerings over the past few months. I have a
Comcast 3000/256 cable modem connection, and have been 100% Linux at
home for almost nine years. Here's my quick impressions of each:

* Sveasoft Samadhi2 - Certainly the most famous
alternative. Unfortunately I could *never* get, after repeated tries
on multiple occasions, to get either the static DNS or bandwidth
management, two of the three primary reasons for using a third-party
to work. Static DNS (having the router's DNS server proffer the static
DHCP settings as internal IP addresses for machines on my network)
works for about 15-30 seconds after a reboot but then suddenly
stops. Bandwidth management has never, ever worked for me (and, yes,
I'm aware of the bug in at least one Sveasoft version in which the
upload and download values got swapped). And of course there's that
ridiculous bug that corrupts static DHCP entries. I have no interest
in paying Sveasoft for later firmware versions in which I presume
these features actually work as advertised; without restarting the
disputes on the subject, I am very dubious about the legalities of
what James Ewing is doing with GPL code.
* Enterprise WRT 0.2 beta1 - Based on the Sveasoft Samadhi2 source
code and also integrating the NoCatSplash authentication portal, which
I don't need. Same results as with Samadhi2 regarding
(non)functionality of bandwidth management or static DNS and the
static DHCP bug.
* OpenWRT b4 - Got errors in the compilation process (not the make
not being able to find two tarfiles; I downloaded those manually) so
used a binary I found online. Promising, and the package system is
quite elegant, but the the lack of substantial documentation and (more
important) the lack of a bandwidth management package also made it a
nonstarter.
* Wifi-Box 2.00.8.1pre6-i - The firmware I use now. Static DHCP and
static DNS work right and work well. SNMP support is useful. No
bandwidth management, but then it doesn't promise it or anything else
it can't deliver. Having the source code on SourceForge offers at
least the promise of future improvements by someone, if not the
incommunicado-at-present author.


--
Read my Deep Thoughts @ <URL:http://www.ylee.org/blog/> PERTH ----> *
Cpu(s): 10.1% us, 4.6% sy, 84.3% ni, 0.5% id, 0.1% wa, 0.3% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 516960k total, 513868k used, 3092k free, 7528k buffers
Swap: 2101032k total, 469280k used, 1631752k free, 71644k cached

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.internet.wireless (More info?)

So, the main reason for you using the 3rd party firmware is for the static
DNS/DHCP? I guess you must have a number of machines behind that router to
make management of ip's / dns names an issue. Curious to ask how many?
I've often wished I could have static DHCP on the BEFSR41. But for DNS, a
script to push out a hosts file to all machines would be enough.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.internet.wireless (More info?)

Mr. Grinch wrote:
> So, the main reason for you using the 3rd party firmware is for the
> static DNS/DHCP?

No; bandwidth management is much more important to me. I can easily
run dnsmasq or another lightweight DNS/DHCP server on one of my
machines for static DNS/DHCP, but bandwidth management really must be
done on the router for maximum benefit by the entire network.

--
Read my Deep Thoughts @ <URL:http://www.ylee.org/blog/> PERTH ----> *
Cpu(s): 30.8% us, 7.8% sy, 54.6% ni, 5.5% id, 0.6% wa, 0.7% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 516960k total, 512816k used, 4144k free, 3892k buffers
Swap: 2101032k total, 289376k used, 1811656k free, 99620k cached