“Things turn out the best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.”
— John Wooden
DD-WRT for the win!
Today I was faced with a difficult wireless networking scenario: looooong house, many thick walls.
The topography is as follows:
Comp A <--- 200 ft., 4 walls ---> Router <--- 150 ft., 3 walls ---> Comp B
The house is older so the walls are very, very solid and RF-absorbing. The old setup involved a Linksys WRT54GX (802.11 b/g) as the router in the middle, a Belkin Wireless-N PCMCIA card on computer A, and a Belkin Wireless-N PCI card on computer B. After many attempts to reposition the wireless adapter’s antennas on computer B with no success I suggested hooking up a WRT54G in client bridging mode (using DD-WRT) to act as the wireless adapter on computer B. Worked like a champ. The signal is now strong and the connection hasn’t dropped one single time.
The kicker is that the WRT54G I used is version 8.2 which has very little RAM and doesn’t support the standard method of upgrading the firmware to DD-WRT.
The Solution
- Download TFTP.
- Download the VX Work Killer firmware for the WRT54G v8.2
- Download the dd-wrt.v24_micro_wrt54gv8.bin firmware for the WRT54G v8.2
- Upload the vxworkskillerGv8-v3.bin firmware to the router.
- Wait for the router to reboot.
- Try to ping the router (192.168.1.1 by default).
- When you can ping the router continue to the next step.
- Open a command prompt and enter
“tftp -i 192.168.1.1 put dd-wrt.v24_micro_wrt54gv8.bin“ - If all went well, when the router reboots it will have DD-WRT on it and be accessible via 192.168.1.1.
- Username: “root”
- Password: “admin”
The connection on computer A is also weak so I’ll be adding a WRT54G to the mix to fix it.
Thank you DD-WRT!