Linksys Hackery

Now the decorating and carpet laying is complete Fliss has her brand new office. Unfortunately due to my lack of desire to run cables under the floor boards and past the bathroom she's missing the needed network connection.

Luckily Will had furnished me with a spare WRT54G so I proceeded to look into building a wireless bridge with it. It's not quite like the wireless bridges I've been building the last 4 days at work though, for starters it doesn't quite supply the same bandwidth :-)

It seems the land of 3rd party firmware for the WRTG has become pretty fragmented with a number of projects, some of which seem to have questionable adherence to the GPL. As I value my freedom I tried to find a project which had the most open development policy and offered the greatest flexibility. In the end I plumped for the FreeWRT project, which itself is a fork of the bigger OpenWRT project. Both seem pretty capable but the FreeWRT project does supply a rather nice web based image builder which clinched it.

The re-flash of the hardware went without a hitch and after a little faffing about with routing default IP addresses I had ssh only access to a minimalist router setup. It didn't take long (and a brief grep for "bridging" in the manual) to get a working WDS setup. Maybe one day I will get around to fixing up my main router with some pimped up firmware.