Flashing My Linksys WRT54GL Router

Occasionally, I have been having trouble surfing the internet when I’m using bittorrent at the same. In the past, all I had to do was reset the router by unplugging the power. Later, I followed some tips of optimizing my connections and restricted my global connection to under 200. This helped a lot and I haven’t need to reset my router anymore for a while.

For the past 2 weeks the connectivity issue has come back again and reseting the router no longer helps anymore. The only way I can resolve the issue is to power down the boardband modem until I get a new IP address assign to me when it restarts.

I decided to take some risk and install a 3rd party firmware for my router as they are often tuned for higher loads. The two most popular firmwares I found are:

Both are GNU/Linux based firmware for embedded devices. I decided to try out DD-WRT because it had a better web interface, as well, as of version v23 was completely rewritten and the Linux Kernel is based on the OpenWrt Kernel.

I flashed my router with the standard generic version of v23 SP2 which can be downloaded from their website. The actually flashing was relatively easy, I just did a firmware upgrade using web administration interface from the original Linksys firmware.

One issue I had, was that I wasn’t able to access the web administration interface for DD-WRT after the flashing. However, that was resolved when I hard reseted my router, unfortuntately all my preivous settings was gone after this, but it wasn’t too painful to set everything back up again.

Related posts:

  1. Optimizing My Router with DD-WRT
  2. DD-WRT v24
  3. Ubuntu 7.04 Freezes/Hangs on IBM NetVista
  4. Building a Server at Home
  5. Ubuntu Quickstart Guide
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