[ale] best firmware for Linksys wrt54gl?

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Tue, 2007-04-03 at 08:18 -0400, Paul Cartwright wrote:

> I guess I'm in the dark here, why do you need to run a 3rd party app
> on top of 
> a wireless router?
> I have a netgear router, and my Kubuntu laptop connects to it ( ok,
> only in 
> open mode..), and I use the web interface from my SUSE desktop to
> administer 
> it. what else do you do withOpenWRT?? 


OpenWRT is much more flexible than the stock firmware.  You can:

      * Configure the thing with SSH and a shell, which is far better if
        you ask me.
      * Supports IPv6 far better than the stock firmware.
      * Configure items that the web interface (both stock and OpenWRT)
        doesn't support, for example, DHCP options for setting up a
        netboot environment (which I do here, for Ubuntu network
        installations)
      * OpenWRT can create a real DMZ, wherein one of the ports is
        separated from the rest of the network.  (well, so I have read.
        I have not done this myself, but I can see where it would make
        sense to do).
      * The package manager tool is "ipkg," which is designed along
        similar lines to "dpkg" but for tiny environments (e.g., not
        hard to learn)
      * Can NFS-mount things--essentially, you can have the box do more
        than just manage the network if you really want.  There are also
        hardware modifications to add hardware storage to it directly,
        so that you can do the same thing.  It appears that some people
        even use their routers with Asterisk, though I couldn't imagine
        doing that with mine.  Of course, the hardware mod would
        probably make that possible by way of swap space, if the CPU
        supports it.

Those are just a few of the things that I can think of.  Like I said
earlier, I have been very happy with mine since I set it up.  When I
decided to do netbooting here to serve install images, it was painless
to configure the router to do, as well, since it already handled the
DHCP requests.  All it does is tell the client to get the stuff from the
server machine that I have.

    -- Mike

--
Michael B. Trausch
                    fd0man at gmail.com
Phone: (404) 592-5746
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Demand Freedom!  Use open and free protocols, standards, and software!
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