The Things I Find

So, I put DD-WRT on my wireless router. It’s pretty nifty - maybe marginally more polished/focussed than OpenWRT, but it takes up a fair amount of my router’s four megabyte flash storage. It helped me get WPA bridged client mode on my Mitsubishi R100 wireless router working for the first time; but I also want to use it as a print server, and there’s no room left in flash for the necessary software. So, back to OpenWRT it is.

The problem is, DD-WRT was refusing to take the OpenWRT .TRX file. Renaming it didn’t help, and I couldn’t see either Javascript on the page, nor responses in FireFox’s LiveHTTPHeaders to indicate what might be blocking it.

The solution? Use the OpenWrt .BIN file. The OpenWRT README says:

openwrt-brcm-2.4-squashfs.trx
This is a generic firmware for any broadcom cpu supported by the whiterussian release. This is the firmware in raw format, exactly as it will be written to the flash.

openwrt-wrtsl54gs-squashfs.bin
This is the exact same as the trx file above, with one exception — a small header has been added to the start of the file, marking it as a valid upgrade for Linksys models.

It looks like DD-WRT requires that “small header”, and refuses to upgrade if it’s not present. Using the .BIN worked fine; and gave me much the same functionality as DD-WRT but with more space for packages.

On a related note, I’m trying Tomato on my Linksys WRT54GL. It’s a cut-down firmware, with a little AJAX goodness on the config pages (to hide disabled groups of options), and some sweet-looking realtime SVG graphs. However, I’m not convinced they are accurate; certainly they don’t match up with what OpenWRT and FireFox are telling me. I like the fact it’ll log to a CIFS/SAMBA (i.e. Windows) network share for historical purposes; and it shows you signal strength even while in client mode; which OpenWRT doesn’t. There’s no package management in the GUI though; I haven’t checked from the command line, but it could be there isn’t any. Still, it’s working fine for me, and setting my WRT54GL into WPA bridged client mode was a piece of cake.