dd-wrt is awesome!

My good friend and fellow blogging partner Mike Svoboda told me about dd-wrt a few weeks ago. Once Mike showed me what dd-wrt was capable of, I knew I needed to deploy it somewhere. I didn’t have a spare access point or router to test dd-wrt, so I decided to pick up a WRT54GL on NewEgg (I got mine for $25 off list price). As a long time OpenBSD and Soekris fan, I was very skeptical that dd-wrt would be able to stack up to what I currently had running (Soekris net4501+OpenBSD+PF) at home.

To get dd-wrt working, I used the installation guide provided on the dd-wrt wiki. Once the standard image was flashed and operational, I logged into the dd-wrt web interface and configured the router to meet my needs. Not only was I amazed with the breadth of features that are available in dd-wrt, but I was totally amazed at the monitoring capabilities that are available out of the box. Here is a screenshot from the bandwidth monitoring tab:


dd-wrt performance graph

dd-wrt has everything I need and more, and I have now completely replaced by OpenBSD router. Here are my favorite dd-wrt features sorted in a top ten list:

1. Super stable (it runs a Linux kernel, which is an added bonus)!

2. Lots of performance graphs and statistics.

3. Support for wireless A/B/G/N + wired Ethernet.

4. Incredible support through the forums (I have yet to use this, but the replies I’ve seen are killer).

5. Built-in support for various wireless security protocols (WPA, WPA2, 802.1X, etc.).

6. Functional DHCP server.

7. NAT and QOS support.

8. Built in DNS caching.

9. Bridging and VLAN support.

10. ipkg, which allows you to add numerous 3rd party packages (samba, upnp servers, etc.) to the router.

This is only a subset of what dd-rt can do, and I can’t speak highly enough of the product! Mike rocks for recommending this, and I am stoked that I have such a reliable device acting as my access point / Internet router (my previous APs were rather flakey, so hopefully you can see why I am so excited about having a stable device routing packets from my wireless and wired host to the Internet).

matty on March 24, 2009 | Filed Under Linux Networking, Networking

5 Comments

Mike  on March 24th, 2009

There’s a few of them, though I never tried dd-rt, I just went to Tomato Firmware for the WRT54GL. I got tired of having a flakey AP too.

Jeremy Baumgartner  on March 24th, 2009

I used to use dd-wrt, but once I found Tomato (http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato), I’ve never looked back. It lacks one feature from your list (no ipkg), but everything else is on par with dd-wrt’s features. There are mods for tomato that include extra packages – I’ve been running the openvpn mod for a while now.

I also had a strange issue where my laptop wouldn’t connect to my AP running dd-wrt. Not sure why, but it worked fine with Tomato. (I’m 99% certain that was a laptop issue though…)

mike  on March 24th, 2009

Solid dude. =) I’m glad you’re digging it.

I love being able to SSH from anyone on the internet and open up a SOCKS proxy to tunnel through the corporate intranets. Sucks having corporate proxies bork up your day.

Run SSH on port 443 so it looks like HTTPS traffic. Nobody will know the difference =D

http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2006/12/08/ssh-tunnel-socks-proxy-forwarding-secure-browsing/

Pwwwet  on March 25th, 2009

Hi !
It’s my first comment on your blog.
OpenWRT and DD-WRT are vulnerable, show -> http://www.dronebl.org/blog/8

matt snow  on April 19th, 2009

DD-WRT is great, but it does have its issues depending on the hardware. I have used it on both Linksys WRT54G v1 and v2. after only a few days at work, or a week at home the linksys needs a reboot. The DNSMasque feature slows things down a bit as well.

I highly recommend the Buffalo WHR-G125 with DD-wrt. I have two of these running in bridge mode to link my office and living room. i’ve seen uptimes as high as 200 days and zero issues, other than being with large file transfers.

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