Have Skills, Will Travel Charles Armour

DD-WRT Wins

After receiving my new laptop, I was dismayed to find that it would not keep a connection to my wireless router for more than a few minutes at a time.  After confirming the issue was with the router (a Netgear WNR834B) by using a few other devices, I decided to upgrade its firmware.  Lo and behold, it’s at the latest version, which came out quite awhile ago (early 2008) .  Since re-flashing with the latest firmware didn’t help, I decided to take the plunge and Flash the router with DD-WRT.

The WNR834B is quite like a few Linksys models, but is hard to find info for.  After finding installation notes here, then finding the proper images here (v2.4sp1) or here (v2.4), the Tftpd32 software refused to upload the image.  It turns out that the Tftpd32 software would not work in Vista, but the other Windows software listed here (download) works great.  While there is a bit of cord jiggling and prayer involved, it was a painless and fairly simple process once I had the proper tools.

I now enjoy a faster, stabler wireless router that supports VPN functions, has nice data graphs and logging, and even allows me to SSH into it!