Hackers and DD-WRT

I figure everyone has heard of hackers and what they do. Most people see a hacker as someone who tries to break into a computer system to steal valuable information. However, there are hackers who many people do not hear about. These hackers have a beneficial motive, usually increasing functionality and/or freedom with an electronic device. Such as those who have designed the custom router firmware DD-WRT.

I have known about DD-WRT for a few months now, and I have always wanted to install it on my wireless router. Mainly because it has a ton of features and is very customizable. I have not been able to install it until recently, since my old router, a USR8054, was not compatible with DD-WRT. However, I bought a WRT54GL wireless router from Linksys, which is supported by DD-WRT, and has sufficient memory to host the standard version of DD-WRT. It arrived about 4 days ago. When it came, I set it up and got it running. I was content with the Linksys firmware for about 2 hours.

The more I read about DD-WRT the more I wanted to install it. Now, as far as I know, DD-WRT is not officially supported by Linksys, and there is a chance of bricking one's router when installing it. Therefore, I was a little unsure on whether or not to install DD-WRT. My $60 router was brand new, and I did not want to ruin it and go back to my old USR8054, which dropped wireless connections a lot. However, the curiosity in me wanted to see what DD-WRT contained, so I decided I would install it. I started working my way through the install guide, reset my router, and downloaded the firmware version I needed. After I saved all the pages I would need to view if something went wrong, I went to my desktop computer and started installing the firmware. I had to wait 5 minutes to make sure the install finished, and I was a little tense during those few minutes. After the install said I could restart my router, I did so. I unplugged my router, plugged it back in, and waited about 30 seconds for everything to start up. After 30 seconds, the indication lights on the front did not look like they were doing what they should. I tried to connect to the router's interface, and could not. I was not sure what to do here, and decided I would restart my router again before doing any of the brick restoration techniques. This time it looked like it was working, I tried to access the interface again, and successfully got to the first page. I spent the next 10 minutes configuring everything that needed to be initially setup.

Now that my router was all ready, I went back to my laptop and successfully connected. I went to my router's interface, and started looking at all the extra settings. I was not sure where to start, so I just worked my way through every page looking at everything. Every time I found something I could use, I enabled it and set it up. This went on for about 30-45 minutes, as QoS took a while to set up. Now that I have set everything up, I must say I am very happy with DD-WRT. It has everything and more a computer freak could want in their router. I did not even know you could do a lot of this with your router. I am glad I chose to install it.