DD-WRT is great!

For some reason I've decided to work on some networking stuff recently as I wanted to take advantage of my taheem.net domain. Also both my D-Link routers in my parents house have gone down which has led to the Virgin Media Super(rubbish)Hub being used as the main router.

So far I've moved the taheem.net domain over to google apps so i can have my own personal email managed by gmail which is quite nice. I did have a custom email account with my bbfun domain but it was using squirrel mail which was a bad web client. On top of this I've been looking into two new routers and I think I'll be messing about with DD-WRT the open source router firmware. It looks like Asus have really taken a good lead into the networking side of things and its interesting to note how well regarded Broadcom is for DD-WRT so I'm tempted by the N16.

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Well I half finished that last post and I decided to leave it in. What I actually ended up buying was the Linksys E3000 and the E4200 as the main router. I bought these for pretty decent price off eBay and amazon and they are both amazing bits of kit. The E4200's range is incredible and you can have a separate 5GHz network for wireless N devices only. Its a shorter range but its on a spectrum that inst really used by a lot of devices. 2.4GHz is used for cordless phones, routers, mice, keyboards etc so It can get a bit noisy.

I've had to look up quite a few networking terms such as wireless bridging which lets you have another access point that's connected wirelessly instead of running a long cable which is great. Also DD-WRT enables you to do some pretty cool stuff like boost the signal of your router and use something called QoS to manage the bandwidth so that certain devices get priority. Its all pretty interesting to know and its amazing how much you can change just by properly managing your router. Seriously the performance was incredible! I went from 10mb/s unstable to 25mb/s stable. It really made a big difference.

Something that kind of amused me was the similarity between the Android modding community over at XDA and the DD-WRT community. You had a lot of different distro's and some were stable depending on the device and you had a lot of guides based on forum posts and I found it odd how the router database on DD-WRT is quite outdated and some guides advised to just go by the wiki. But I guess thats the effect of an open source system.

 Its expected but all that aside it is a great platform and you can learn a lot from messing about with this stuff. I'd forgotten how its fun to just tinker with Linux and mess about with the settings on a router to improve things. I've also messed about a bit with Amahi again and I have a feeling I'll be trying to do more things with it. I really do urge you to go through some lifehacker posts to see what you can do and then look through the DD-WRT wiki for the router of your choice. It can really improve things dramatically.