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cazh1: on Business, Information, and Technology

Thoughts and observations on the intersection of technology and business; searching for better understanding of what's relevant, where's the value, and (always) what's the goal ...

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Tomato Firmware - Upgrading my Wireless Router

Tomato Firmware - Upgrading my Wireless Router

I'm not going to retell the story of the Linksys WRT54G wireless router (ok, read this if you are curious). Just capturing some key learnings, to be googled / indexed / found by the next person experiencing issues.

  • I settled on the Tomato firmware - seemed to get the best reviews, and it covered the basics for me. The home page is reasonable - you can subscribe to an RSS feed to keep informed of updates. The best feature may actually be the fairly decent documentation available on Wikibooks.
  • The biggest hassle I had was trying to get DHCP to work. I am (finally) in the process of ripping out an old Win2K AD network, switching to a Linux-based development model with support for the family PC (still Win XP) and my daughter's college MacBook. Try as I may, I couldn't get the router to hand out IP addresses, even after I shut down the old AD server (it was the DHCP server in the "old model").
  • The solution was to thoroughly erase the non-volatile RAM - something in the old config was just getting in the way. This is found on the Administration > Configuration > Restore Default Configuration menu - select the Erase all data in NVRAM (thorough) option in the combo box.
  • Also, I've found that none of the settings under the Advanced > Wireless menu option do much of anything - except, of course, the Transmit Power option. Much easier to get a signal in the basement now.
  • I had a bit of trouble changing the WINS name on my daughter's MacBook Pro - didn't have any luck, so I set up a Static IP, as this option let's me define the device name as well.

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    posted by James P. MacLennan at 7:40 AM | Permalink | 0 Comments

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