Router modding with DD-WRT

Anthony Caruana
Friday, 03 December 2010 09:25

Your IT - Mobility

Strip away the casing of most routers and you're left with a fairly standard set of components. However, router makers use firmware to create differences between their products. The problem is that many very useful features that are possible with the hardware are made difficult or impossible by the software. DD-WRT is an open source, Linux-based alternative firmware that can be used with a massive variety of different routers.

My journey with DD-WRT started a couple of years ago. I was running a pair of Linksys WRT310N routers on my LAN. If you're running two routers on your LAN the best way to configure them is to make one a router and the other an access point. This reduces the chance of flakiness as you'll only be running a single DHCP server. Some routers support an 'Access Point' mode out of the box but most of the routers we've tested over the years don't.

One of our routers died this week so we needed to replace it. As we needed dual-band 802.11n and Gigabit Ethernet, our choices were slightly limited. We ended up with a Netgear N600 - model number WNDR3700. At a touch under $300 it wasn't cheap but we were desperate and the slight markdown at the store we purchased from sealed the deal.

After unpacking and plugging the router in we hit our first, anticipated, hurdle - there was no one-click access point mode. We've seen this in several routers including models from Belkin and Billion in the past but our Netgear router had no such option. Fiddling with the routing functions and disabling DHCP didn't help. Rather than wasting time, we went straight to the DD-WRT web site.

Open source sometimes has the reputation of being a little rough around the edges. That's definitely not the case with DD-WRT. We chose the 'Download' link at the top of the DD-WRT homepage. We entered the model number of our router into the search box and within a second or two we had conformation that our router was supported. If you're planning ahead, there's a supported devices list to help you plan ahead.

We downloaded the appropriate firmware and printed out a copy of the instructions just in case. We worked from a MacBook Pro running OS X 10.6.5 with Safari but any web browser should be fine. Installation of DD-WRT was very straightforward as the router's standard firmware upgrade interface worked perfectly with DD-WRT.