Adventures with DD-WRT Addendum: Switching from DD-WRT to Tomato
So this became the straw that broke the camel's back. I actually did come up with a workaround that used MiniUPnP for NAT-PMP and then used the built-in UPnP as the fallback. …
JibberJabber
Adventures with DD-WRT Part 9: Conclusion
So this concludes my adventures with DD-WRT (for now).
There are plenty of other things to install. I may eventually get around to installing those. But of the remaining components that interest me, there is at least documentation. So I don't feel compelled to write up those pieces as I did for Avahi and MiniUPnP.
All that remains is giving my overall opinion. So far, my opinion is mixed.
Stability & Features
First, their firmware seems to be much better than the stuff I get from the off-the-shelf home routers with respect to feature set, bugs, and stability. So I will always opt for flashing my router from now on. However, I am less certain about my choice in DD-WRT vs. …
Adventures with DD-WRT Part 8: How I built a cheap Apple Airport Base Station substitute for $30
Ha ha. Okay, it was closer to $35 for me, but I'm told if you wait for the right time, you can buy an Asus WL-520gU for $30 or less.
But the question has been asked of me, "Is this just a way of getting an Apple Airport without paying for one?", or "Why didn't you just buy an Apple Airport?"
Is this an Apple Airport Base Station replacement? Well, there are differences so it might not be a totally fair comparison. But the title was too catchy to pass up. I'm curious what those search engines are going to do. :)
Hardware Features and Cost
But first, just from a hardware point, we would need to compare models of Apple Airport with my device. Since the Asus WL-520gU lacks 802.11n, we would either have to compare with an older Apple model, or we need to bring in a newer model like the …
Adventures with DD-WRT Part 7: Installing MiniUPnP
So it seems enough people are having problems with DD-WRT's built-in UPnP support, that there is an automated script that has been written that will fetch a prebuilt MiniUPnP package from a server, unpack it into the RAM disk, run the daemon, and reconfigure the firewall rules.
Unfortunately, the script didn't work out of the box for me. And I also prefer to not have to re-download the package every time I reboot the router. I would prefer to have a local copy, especially since I do have disk space available.
So first, in my opinion, the easiest thing to is just follow their instructions to get everything on your system. Then we'll apply the necessary changes. …
Adventures with DD-WRT Part 6: UPnP and NAT-PMP
DD-WRT ships with a UPnP implementation built-in. However, according to multiple posts I've found, the implementation seems to be kind of broken. There are a sufficient number of applications that fail to operate with DD-WRT's chosen UPnP daemon that many users in the community have worked around it.
To see it for myself, I tried an unscientific assortment of applications that use UPnP, and some did indeed have problems.
After reading further about the problem, I read that both Tomato and OpenWRT already replaced their old UPnP implementation with a different one called MiniUPnP. This one actually seems to work for everybody and also appears to be used by some commercial routers too. …
Adventures with DD-WRT Part 5: Installing Optware & Avahi (Zeroconf)
Last time, I laid out my motivations of why I want Zeroconf on the router. Now let's actually do it. I will use Avahi because there are prebuilt packages available for it.
I actually tried two different ways, but the first way didn't work.
With the first way, I noticed there was a direct Avahi package available from the OpenWRT and I was under the impression from the documentation that DD-WRT had support for OpenWRT packages. Unfortunately when I actually tried starting the Avahi-daemon, the process failed to daemonize and would abort. I could not figure out why this happened. So I went to Optware.
So in DD-WRT, there is a significant amount of documentation devoted to another packaging system called Optware. …
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