A few weeks back, I bought a Linksys WRT54G. I only had minor problems with my existing wireless router, but I’ve been hearing some great things about how customizable this one is because it’s open source and runs Linux. Hey, $60 for a Linux box is pretty impressive.
However, if I loaded it moderately heavily, like if I attempted to bittorrent the latest Doctor Who episode while listening to mp3s NFS mounted from my server, the wireless connection would start acting weird, and eventually stop transferring data at all, while showing full signal strength in MacStumbler. But the wired connections to the Linux server and the G4 downstairs kept working. But the only way to get wireless working again was to go downstairs and power cycle it. Which is a pain in the knees.
So it was recommended that I try one of the third party firmwares out there. I’m not sure if I want all the bells and whistles of the full Sveasoft distro, and so rather than paying the $20 for it I thought I’d try on of the free ones. I just installed dd.wrt.v22.prefinal3.1.bin. It adds a few nifty features, most of which I don’t care about. But it does have busybox on it, so I can ssh into the box. That’s just weird. But what I really want to see if it can go a few days without needing a power cycle.
Mine’s been doing that lately (today was particularly frustrating), and I’m running dd-wrt already. I’m not sure even sveasoft will fix it, because dd-wrt is based on sveasoft, but at least there’s the option to poke around and fix it. I haven’t had a chance to figure out what’s going on yet (today was a duplicate packet extravaganza, even though nothing was getting to the clients, and then just started working) but I know it’d be harder to figure out if I couldn’t ssh in.
I’m still running the Linksys firmware and haven’t had any such problem. I did occasionally find I had to power cycle the unit during the summer, but that was maybe once a month. Hasn’t been an issue since the weather has cooled down.
Do sometimes consider installing a third-party firmware on it, but as it Just Works I’m not seeing much reason to do so. Would be more interested in doing something like that with an NSLU2 some day.
I was having similar problems with my SMC Barricade – if I was BTing it would cave under the pressure and stop doing anything useful whatsoever. Sometimes it lasted 15 minutes, sometimes it lasted half a day. I eventually just replaced its router function with a (noisy 🙁 ) PC running FreeBSD and use it only as a cheapie little switched hub. Very disappointing, and makes me leery of using the cheap DSL routers again.