I got ambitious yesterday and decided to upgrade the firmware on my WRT54G wireless router. While there are a lot of choices, including EWRT, OpenWRT, I decided to use the semi-open Sveasoft firmware. We’ll it is open, at least the release that I used, which is the slightly older Samadhi release. So, after first using the Ping.asp exploit to turn boot_wait on, I then uploaded the firmware. It seemd as though everything went okay, the router continued to function and give out IP addresses. However, there was a big hitch, I couldn’t get to the internet from my computers behind it. It turns out I had to reset the configuration of the device. After this everything worked like a charm. I’ve got SSH running on the box and it now hands out static IP addresses via DHCP, these addresses also get a hostname too. I haven’t gotten around to mucking with WonderShaper yet because most of the time I don’t come close to fully utilizing my bandwidth.
I’ve given some thought to running it as an open access point for everyone, but this would mean removing my WEP encryption (yes, it’s a joke for a good hacker, I know), which is not going to happen any time soon. I’m eagerly awaiting the ability to have the box grab an IPv6 address and do all that fun stuff. Which would be very cool. For right now, I’ll have to settle with leaving a few ports open to get behind the firewall to my server.