Hardware: After a few weeks running OpenWRT on a Linksys WRT54G, here’s a status report.
Things that the new WRT54G running OpenWRT does a whole lot better than the Netgear MR814:
- Baseline: obviously it doesn’t DDoS the University of Wisconsin, and it doesn’t lose the internet connection regularly, as noted in that prior post. I knew that, so those are not really new wins, though.
- It’s quite noticeably faster. I’ve seen it spike to double the old throughput rates, and it’s solid, too; less deviation in those rates.
- It doesn’t break my work VPN. I wasn’t sure if it was the MR814 that was doing this, requiring an average of about 20 reconnects per day — now, I know it for a fact. I’ve had to reconnect my VPN connection about 4 times over the past week.
- It doesn’t break the Gigafast UIC-741 USB wifi dongle I’m using on the MythTV box. Previously that would periodically disappear from the HAN. Again, I had this pegged as an issue with the driver for that; removing the MR814 from the equation has solved it, too, and it’s now running with 100% uptime so far.
- It does traffic shaping with Wondershaper, so I can use interactive SSH, VNC, or remote desktop while downloading, even if it’s another machine on the HAN doing the download.
- It’s running linux — ssh’ing in, using ifconfig, and vi’ing shell scripts on my router is very, very nice.
Man, that MR814 was a piece of crud. ;) I can’t recommend OpenWRT enough…