I have a WNR3500L and I'm considering going to one of the open source firmware sets. In general this router running the Netgear firmware is meeting my needs - but there are a couple of issues I'm having that I'd be interested to hear people's opinions as to whether a different firmware might improve the situation.
- We recently completed some basement construction and the router is now in a closet where range seems to be reduced. I haven't yet tried different channels - and I'll do some experimenting with that. Do the open source firmware sets provide more flexibility with radio configuration where this might be improved?
- I do backups to an external hard drive connected to the router. Readyshare performance is horrible, IMHO. Is external hard drive performance improved with DD-WRT or Tomato compared with Readyshare?
- Is there FTP hard drive access with DD-WRT or Tomato?
- Do DD-WRT and/or Tomato allow *multiple simultaneous* VPN passthrough? Both my wife and I need VPN passthrough at the same time. I may be showing my age - but I've had routers that claimed VPN passthrough - but it was only one session at a time. Maybe that's an issue of the past.
Any comments on the above "requirements" and which, if any, of the open source firmware sets might be best, I'd VERY much appreciate.
Thanks.
Jim
You probably will not see any improvements on wireless range or USB connected device speed with a different firmware.
I haven't tried your last 2 questions but its pretty easy to switch back and forth between firmwares. Might be worth the effort to give one or two a try.
Do you want to just attach a HDD and copy files through ftp ?? If yes, then ddwrt is able to perform that.
Mainly people uses the OpenSource firmwares because of reach feature set and easy configuration through WebUI.
As Brandon said its pretty easy to revert back to Stock firmware and use "Restore Saved Settings" option to get back all your configurations in Stock firmware.
Well - since starting this thread I went to DD-WRT. I first bought a secondary router and using WDS connected it (running DD-WRT) to my primary router running stock firmware. The stock firmware, however, only allows WEP when using WDS. I wanted something more secure. So I flashed the primary router to DD-WRT as well, and then connected both DD-WRT devices using WDS. It's working fantastically well. The client router acts as a secondary access point, and the routers figure out which access point for a given client to connect to - depending on signal strength. Single SSID, single security. It's awesome.
Thanks.
Jim
@Haselsmasher: Its nice to hear about your experience about WDS.
What is your experience about "FTP hard drive access"?
The FTP hard drive access works just fine. My preferred backup prog is Syncback. I've been using it for a while and so it's familiar to me. Unfortunately Syncback is known for having wonky FTP capabilities. And that seemed to be the case with DD-WRT's FTP server. Syncback would hang sometimes. It's unfortunate - because Syncback is AWESOME when using network drive letter access, but weird with some FTP servers. I tried many freeware FTP backup programs as alternates to Syncback and didn't like any as much as I like Syncback.
So - I installed Optware on my router and got Samba running to get me network drive access. And I'm continuing with Syncback via network drive letter access.
Things are working great. DD-WRT is just awesome.
Jim
Great to hear about your experience. Keep us sharing it.
I'm running v24-sp2. It's dated 8/7/2010.
It's running very very well.
Jim