Planet Geek

Linksys router upgrade

Geekitude

Nothing like a nice quiet thanksgiving weekend to take it easy around the house, enjoy some quiet time with the family, and... UPGRADE YOUR ROUTER!

Our Linksys WRT54g has been happily managing our net connection for about 2 years now. I've been noticing some twitchy problems with it off and on (about once a month it stops handing out DHCP addresses, we have to reboot it), and it has shown other small problems. The final straw came about 6 months ago when I realized I had lost the administration password. This meant I couldn't even log INTO the router to find out what was wrong with it. Something had to be done!

(6 months later)

Okay, time to fix it! I reset the router (holding in the reset button for 10 seconds does this) which resets it to factory defaults. The default password on Linksys routers is just 'admin' in the password field (surfing the neighborhood? See an SSID of 'linksys'? Hit 192.168.1.1, and try 'admin' in the password field. Welcome to someone's router! - some versions of the linksys may require admin in the username field as well).

The first thing I did was confirm that I could log into the router and that default configurations worked with our Comcast cable modem (they did). After resetting the password and the SSID, I took the opportunity to upgrade the firmware in the router. And I'm super-happy I did.

The firmware I was using was v 1.00.02. The current version is 1.02.2. The number of 'fixes' between those versions? somewhere around a bazillion. On the one hand, I do appreciate that Linksys is actively updating their firmware. On the other hand, that's a lot of bugfixes for a router that's only 18 months old.

I'm seriously considering checking out DD-WRT, the opensource firmware for the WRT54G. It has a truly impressive feature list, including native OpenVPN client and server support. Unfortunately, my router is a Version 6, which only has 2mb of flash in it. That means I can't run fit a larger firmware image onto the device. Alas. Maybe I'll eBay an older revision that has 16meg in it.

For now, I'm back up and running, and hopefully won't have my roomies having to fight with constant connection drops and router resets.

Posted by dbs at November 24, 2007 10:58 AM