[IP] The Open Source WRT54G Story
Begin forwarded message:
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: November 8, 2005 12:45:33 PM EST
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Open Source WRT54G Story
Reply-To: dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
The Open Source WRT54G Story
November 8, 2005
<http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/3562391>
The story of the Linksys Wireless-G Router (model WRT54G) and how you
can turn a $60 router into a $600 router is a little bit CSI and a
little bit Freaks & Geeks. It’s also the story of how the open source
movement can produce a win-win scenario for both consumers and
commercial vendors. What’s especially exciting is that tricking out
this router doesn’t require any eBay sleuthing or other hunt for some
off-the-wall piece of hardware. Instead, grab it off-the-shelf. The
WRT54G is stacked high in every Best Buy and Circuit City across the
country and, of course, most online retailers — Amazon.com sells it
for $55. It’s ubiquitous and, some would say, a diamond in the rough.
Or a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
While routers used to be the domain of networking specialists,
they’ve gone mainstream along with residential broadband. Commodity
routers can be had for as little as – well, "free after rebate” in
some cases, and often not much more. To keep them cheap, consumer-
grade vendors like Linksys repackage designs from OEM vendors rather
than design the hardware and software in-house.
The tradeoff for these sub-$100 routers can be reliability,
particularly in the coding of the firmware – the software “brain”
that controls the router’s functions. Consumer-grade firmware may be
buggy, and may be limited in functionality compared to commercial-
grade routers designed for business such as those made by Cisco and
SonicWall.
The WRT54G was released in 2003 in anticipation of the 802.11g
standard, with its theoretical maximum bandwidth of 54Mbps compared
to 802.11b’s 11Mbps. In many respects the WRT54G is a typical
wireless router – it accepts an incoming broadband link such as cable
or DSL and shares it between its built-in four-port Ethernet switch
and antennae for broadcasting the signal to wireless clients.
In June 2003 some folks on the Linux Kernel Mailing List sniffed
around the WRT54G and found that its firmware was based on Linux
components. Because Linux is released under the GNU General Public
License, or GPL, the terms of the license obliged Linksys to make
available the source code to the WRT54G firmware. As most router
firmware is proprietary code, vendors have no such obligation. It
remains unclear whether Linksys was aware of the WRT54G’s Linux
lineage, and its associated source requirements, at the time they
released the router. But ultimately, under outside pressure to
deliver on their legal obligation under the GPL, Linksys open sourced
the WRT54G firmware in July 2003.
With the code in hand, developers learned exactly how to talk to the
hardware inside and how to code any features the hardware could
support. It has spawning a handful of open source firmware projects
for the WRT54G that extend its capabilities, and reliability, far
beyond what is expected from a cheap consumer-grade router.
Feature-Packed Firmwares
So the Linksys WRT54G can be loaded with replacement firmware with
exciting new features. Which raises the question – like what?
Of course, you can expect most replacement firmware to support the
same basic functions Linksys provides out of the box for this
wireless router. Often these features will be more stable, in cases
where Linksys’ bugs have been fixed by other developers. But that’s
not what makes open source firmware so exciting.
The real deal is what the WRT54G can do, with the right replacement
firmware, that you’d only expect to find on a commercial-grade router
costing several times as much.
You could use the WRT54G as a repeater or a bridge. Create a wireless
distribution system (WDS) or a mesh network. Run a VPN server. Or a
VoIP server. Or a managed hotspot with a RADIUS server. Manage
bandwidth use per protocol. Control traffic shaping. Support IPv6.
Boost antenna power. Remotely access router logs. Operate the router
as a miniature low-power PC, running a variety of Linux applications.
That’s just the short list. Some firmware offerings support a wide
range of these features while others are more tailored to specific
router applications. Some sport friendlier configuration interfaces
while some are command-line driven. And because these firmware files
descend from Linksys’ open-source progenitor, they are freely available.
The important caveat, of course, is that Linksys will not support
alternative firmware, only their own official version. Should you run
into a problem with replacement firmware, or wind up disabling your
router (which is rare but possible – stay tuned), you’ll be on your
own. If you already own a WRT54G and it performs just the way you
need it to, mucking around with replacement firmware might just break
something that didn’t need fixing.
On the other hand, if adding enterprise features to a $60 router
sounds worth the minimal risk, you don’t need any special hacker
skills to get there. If you’ve already setup an off-the-shelf router
before, replacing the WRT54G’s stock firmware with a feature-laden
substitute is well within reach.
Choose Your Firmware
Besides Linksys’ own official firmware, there are more than a dozen
varieties of firmware replacements available for the WRT54G. The most
popular are named Alchemy and Talisman, released by a company called
Sveasoft, and another named DD-WRT, by a guy named BrainSlayer.
[snip]
Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>
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