Do you have wireless access points or routers and want to add some useful features without incurring additional costs? Have we got a deal for you. The DD-WRT project might just be the ticket.
So, I was asked by my lovely spouse to move the home office to another room for a particular reason. Unfortunately, the new location did not have an existing outlet for the broadband internet line. Immediately my eyes widened and a grin broke across my face as I knew it was an opportunity to try something I had been wanting to for quite a while.
Rather than run wiring and such, let’s go wireless. Yes, a wireless bridge was going to be the ticket. As it happened, I already had two Linksys WRT54G wireless routers, so I was in business. After spending a bit of time on the DD-WRT website, I had the details I needed and downloaded the bits I needed.
DD-WRT is a free alternative firmware for many major brand wireless routers and access points. Now, yes this may void your warranty but if you’re like me, that limited warranty was out many moons ago. DD-WRT firmware provides for more features and functions to be available to you. You can make your wireless router or AP can then do tricks you never knew it could.
This video gives a good idea of how we did it.
How did we get this to work? Here is the process we used.
DD-WRT Installation Instructions on the wiki.
- Download the proper firmware for our version of the WRT54G. Use the compatability matrix to determine the correct DD-WRT version for your device and device version.
- Performed a full 30/30/30 hard reset of the router
- Open your web browser and connect to the router at 192.168.1.1 and login with the default username/password.
- You should be in the Web GUI of the router.
- Click the “Administration” tab
- Click the “Firmware Upgrade” sub-tab.
- Click the “Browse” button and select the DD-WRT .bin file you downloaded and confirmed.
- Click the “Upgrade” button.
- The router will take a few minutes to upload the file and flash the firmware. During this time, the power light will flash.
- A new page will open confirming that the upload was successful Now wait about 5 minutes before clicking “Continue”.
- Lastly, do another hard reset on the unit.
- If flashed successfully you will now be able to access the DD-WRT web interface at 192.168.1.1
Now, since we wanted to utilized a wireless bridge, we needed to repeat the above steps on the second router. After the firmware updates were complete, we individually tested each router, connected to our broadband service to ensure both were working properly.
Next we followed this post on the setup the wireless bridge.
One thing that was a problem initially was the lack of machines connected to the second router (bridged AP) getting IP addresses from DHCP. It wasn’t until we read completely and did a bit of searching that we found out that this is a known problem with DD-WRT v24. Some folks report that it worked fine in earlier releases, but it appears to be a bug currently.
This was a bit of a bummer, but easily worked around for our small setup. We just setup the desktop machines with static IP addresses outside of the DHCP scope of the primary router but on the same network subnet. The default gateway and DNS were setup to point at the primary router (192.168.1.1) as well.
Immediately we could browse the internet from the office desktop machine which was connected to the second (bridged) router. Success! Now of course, DD-WRT offers many other features that the standard Linksys firmware does not. We’ll leave that as an adventure for you until we report more on those specifics.
Blessings.
Popularity: 30% [?]
