In a world where our routers look more and more like upside-down spiders than things you would like to have in your living room, there are only a handful of routers that may be considered “famous.” Steve Jobs’ efforts to sell AirPort—most famously by using a hula hoop during a product demo—definitely deserve notice in this category, and the mesh routers made by the Amazon-owned Eero probably fit in this category as well. But a certain Linksys router, despite being nearly 20 years old at this point, takes the cake—and it’s all because of a feature that initially went undocumented that proved extremely popular with a specific user base. Today’s Tedium talks about the blue-and-black icon of wireless access, the Linksys WRT54G. This is the wireless router that showed the world what a wireless router could do.
I’ve often pondered tinkering with this, but I’m terrible with anything related to networking – it seems like it’s a weird world of technology that exists on its own separate plane, disconnected from everything else. Networking is obtuse, and as long as our home network is functioning, I’m not touching it.
You don’t have to replace your current router with it just to tinker (and hopefully you wouldn’t want to, it’s a G-only device that would take you back to 2003 era speeds). I got my hands on one a few years ago for $5 thanks to a garage sale in my neighborhood. So far I’ve set it up as a WiFi-Ethernet bridge to get an older Pi online over WiFi, a packet sniffer/analyzer, and most recently an amateur radio Broadband HamNet node.
Ahhh the good ol’ WRT54G — I’m connected to a hacked one right now as I write this post. I honestly didn’t know speeds had improved much since I installed it; is the internet really that much faster now?!
Anyhow, the reason I like it is that I know I can probably tinker with it if I need it to do something special. Currently that’s restricted to turning off WiFi at night to reduce the microwave load in our house just a little.
Yes, internet really has gotten that much faster now. 200 mbit/sec down, 20 mbit/sec up is about the slowest you can get while enthousiasts or companies can relatively easily get synchronous gigabit speeds nowadays. And of course we have many more devices connected inside a Wifi network that can communicate directly with the internal network like a (home) server, sonos, miracast/chromecast, etc. Most modern offices don’t even include wired networking on the workfloor anymore.
avgalen,
Where do you live? I can’t determine if you are being sarcastic or this is really true where you are…?
https://i.imgur.com/JBASsX9.png
I’m on long island. Further west customers have competition between FIOS and Optimum Online, But here we have the misfortune of having a sole provider. We have the standard package “up to 100 Mbps and upload speeds up to 35 Mbps”, but as you can see it doesn’t reach that. The last time I checked we couldn’t get a higher package in our area.
These prices don’t include some $20 of additional monthly fees, regardless take note that there are three tiers lower than this.
https://i.imgur.com/bRwTiQ5.png
On a side note, Optimum Online was bought by a new owner Altice, who doubled all customer packages. It looked good on paper, but as far as I can tell their physical infrastructure investments were made in areas that are actively competing with FIOS and not here. The packages under the previous owner Cable Vision were lousy, but at least we routinely got ~103% of the advertised speed. Under Altice management, the service is oversubscribed and we’re experiencing a lot more packet loss.
I just checked the prices of Virgin Media and since I ditched them the prices have shot up doubtless to cover the cost of multiple leveraged buyouts and mergers. The actual cable network was paid for by tax concessions years ago. A merger with the debt fuelled NTL and later buy out by Liberty media isn’t making prices go down. The thing is Telewest (which asborbed Cable and Wireless) could have been debt free in five years but management decided to take a golden handshake and cash out as multi-millionaires. How the regulators didn’t step in I don’t know. Private Eye covered this story and it didn’t make a jot of difference,
What amazes me is I can get faster broadband over my mobile phone now than I could when I first got cable internet. In comparison to cable it’s flakey and not as fast as cable but I’m not paying stupid rip-off prices for 100 Mb/s I won’t use and costs no more or less to provide than 50 Mb/s or 200 Mb/s. Apart from contention and margins there’s no reason why everyone can’t have 1Gb/s but I would admit it would be an uneven experience.
Funny you’ve mentioned it. I’m doing the exact opposite – wiring up the house with cat6. Wifi is great for phones and tablets but nothing beats the speed and reliability of a network cable. This has become painfully obvious during lockdowns.
Wifi speed has improved a lot but by far the biggest gain came from switching to 5GHz band. Sometimes less (range) is more (less interference). In my area 2.4G is unusable because I can see SSIDs of 20+ different networks. At 5Ghz it’s pretty much just my AP.
As for WRT54G, it has shown it isn’t all just about features and performance. How about being in control of your hardware and trusting it for once? I honestly don’t see how could anyone trust a device, especially a router, running closed-source firmware. WRT54G was also an important part of the OSS movement. There are now several similar projects, a market for routers shipped with an OS firmware, 3rd party converted routers and ones that can be converted. I wouldn’t mind if this has spreaded to other devices as well (NASes, phones, smart TVs etc.).
I agree with cable. It’s just more secure and has less contention issues and faster and more reliable. Wifi can be a bit of a lazy option and simply fashion.
Cable routers can be necessary to a point for authentication and protecting the network. (During one fairly recent firmware panic a few years ago GCHQ checked network router firmware and worked with ISPs to harden any dodgy firmware. I read the one I was supplied with was in the clear.) There is nothing stopping anyone setting the ISP supplied router to modem only and having their own router. This will typically be better than the bog standard cable company anyway like being able to wire and place you own aerials not just features in the box.
Pretty much anything with a radio in it today is a software defined radio and I imagine regulators would get twitchy with people being able to mess about with these. That said IHVs can lock the hardware if need be while allowing open source which is handy especially if IHVs go bust so othewise good hardware is not “repairable”.
HollyB
With older cable modems you could always bring your own router and have it assigned your public IP address directly. But increasingly I’m seeing they force you behind their router. It then forces all traffic to go through their own network address translation, which can make port forwarding a pain and can break some forms of UDP hole punching and NATP, etc running on your router. As a user, you might see it break P2P traffic like bittorrent, etc. Sometimes the ISP’s routers will timeout their NAT entries too aggressively resulting in hung sessions.
This may be ok for most users but it’s annoying for uses who intend on using their own router, it’s not ideal to put your NAT translating router behind another NAT translating router.
@Alfman
I can’t remember the details but basically the new routers could be switched to modem mode so they functioned just like the old cable modems if you wanted. I never heard anyone raise any issues. I am no longer with them so can’t check nor do I have any idea about the differences between UK and US implementation practices.
I don’t worry about any of this now. I’ve had my fill of technology and not going to pour over manuals as a hobby. This stuff can stretch you thin and a lot of talked about issues are because of politics or fashion which changes with the wind. There are enough engineers and developers and domestic IT media who will speak up if things get stupid plus the regulatory regime is more customer friendly than the US. on the other hand we have an increasingly anti-expert and increasingly far right government in the UK which is sucking up more of my emotional energy, I do not look to them for technology leadership nor solutions to market failure.
NAT is unavoidable for IPv4, The cost of addresses goes up and availability goes down. You are stuck behind provider-enforced NAT on virtually all mobile networks, as well as increasingly on fixed line providers. Newer providers have no choice, and neither do providers in developing countries as it’s virtually impossible to get enough IPv4 addresses to support a significant customer base without exorbitant costs which you then have to pass on to users. Getting public IPv4 in some countries requires a business service costing several hundred USD per month.
Operating NAT at the provider level also has significant costs, which again need to be paid for by the customers.
This is only going to get worse and the only real solution to it is IPv6.
bert64,
Obviously I agree with all of that.
Technically I agree with you, but I am loosing faith in this actually happening universally. World IPv6 was a decade ago and seems like a distant memory, yet I still cannot get native IPv6 service here. Some of my servers do in fact have IPv6, but they’re not all reachable due to peering disputes.
https://adminhacks.com/broken-IPv6.html
…argh this is so frustrating!!
NAT must die…long live NAT.
@Alfman / @bert64
I have dual router setup, ISP router first and everything set to port forward to the second router.
Luckily I don’t have any NAT sessions starvation or whatever.
But I did notice recently the ISP router now also has IPv6 so I guess I need to still set that up on my own router. Or remove it completely. We’ll see…
So surprisingly it does seem we are making some progress with IPv6 !
Lennie,
Well, good! I would have liked to know what ISP you are using, but I guess it doesn’t matter since it isn’t something I have much control over.
Another problem you probably will encounter is that google refuses to support dhcp6 in android and if you try to subnet your 64bit network it will not work and cannot work without NAT.
https://www.nullzero.co.uk/android-does-not-support-dhcpv6-and-google-wont-fix-that/
Google’s giving the big middle finger to sysadmins. They believe auto-configuration via SLAAC should be good enough for everyone, screwing over everyone with less than a 64 bit network allocation. And while the 128bits of IPv6 address space is huge, I’m already encountering scenarios where customers are NOT being allowed to have more than a single 64bit network (and to be fair that is ridiculously large). Still because of google’s damned stupidity we can no longer subnet networks as we would with IPv4. If I wanted to keep my 3 subnets that exist for administrative purposes I’d have to role out IPv6 with NAT on day one… Apple devices don’t have this issue, it really sucks that a single vendor can ruin IPv6 network plans. If google employees are listening, please pass along the message that your employer is being boneheaded!
Not sure if you wrote it like this on purpose, but if your level of networking causes you to be disconnected from everything else you are indeed terrible at it 😉
avgalen,
LOL
Thom Holwerda,
If you’ve got any interest in this, you’ve got a lot of us here who could help you out. You could set up a home lab. Routers like WRT54G are trivial to swap in and out, so you wouldn’t really have to worry about breaking anything. Flashing routers can carry some risks, but the risk is quite low for such a cheap router that is supported as well as the WRT54G is.
I’m sure you could get it working. You can unlock a lot of advanced features, but honestly you probably won’t find them useful for anything you do. The main reason to do it with that router is fun and/or education.
You mentioned trying your hand at soldering some time ago…personally I find that more gratifying than flashing firmwares. Maybe you could turn a WRT54G into a robot, haha.
Adamant IT has some good vids on soldering and good solder gun review.
LFC#199 – SMD Soldering Crash Course With Amateur Equipment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzBAv_puMDM
Let’s Review – TS100 Portable Soldering Iron
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cqyjM3Tyfs
WRT54G was good back in the day, but there are much better (open source) alternatives now.
pfsense (FreeBSD)
This is one of the best “classic router style” appliance OSes. However even though it is open source, the underlying company tries to push their own hardware products:
https://www.pfsense.org/products/
OPNsense (free’er fork of pfsense):
https://docs.opnsense.org/manual/hardware.html
OpenWRT (Linux):
This is more for converting existing networking gear into a more open platform. I had successfully used on several older TPLink routers, but support more than a thousand devices (with varying success):
https://openwrt.org/toh/start
Tomato (spiritual successor for ddwrt):
A modernized version of ddwrt. Supports only a handful of devices, though.
https://www.enginoor.com/list-of-tomato-compatible-routers/
There are also vendors that has high end ARM equipment if you are interested:
https://www.solid-run.com/arm-servers-networking-platforms/
Or if you want to go big and buy a SuperMicro Epyc server (that will do much more than being a router):
https://www.newegg.com/supermicro-as-e301-9d-8cn4-single-amd-epyc-3251-soc-processor/p/N82E16816139275
On top of Netgate being a bunch of immature a**holes. They took the OPNsense fork very poorly. OPNsense had to sue Netgate to get opnsense.com back because Netgate bought it and created an OPNsense themed goat.cx tribute, and then Netgate people would find OPNsense being mentioned then just destroy the conversation by basing OPNsense.
OPNsense is the better FreeBSD based router project. They fixed the UI, and it’s been rebased on HardenedBSD, which is a full FreeBSD with security patches, instead of being derived from m0n0wall.
Nothing against m0n0wall, but it’s kind of weird.
OpenWRT supports the largest amount of hardware, by far. It’s a solid choice.
It’s biggest problem is relying on it’s own weird configuration utility (UCI), and it’s documentation being spotty.
I still use OpenWRT, but only as long as I don’t plan on doing anything too complicated. If it’s complicated, OPNsense since I find it easier to work with.
Is Tomato still going? It was my go to firmware back in the day. It’s UI is much better then the other Linux based router firmware projects, but I thought it was dying out as routers moved on from Broadcom chips.
WRT54GL and Asus RT-N16 with Tomato were awesome little routers. I still have a pair of the Asus router which I use to build test networks.
PC Engines APU2 (https://www.pcengines.ch/apu2.htm) are nice little devices.
Other options:
* BSD Router Project (FreeBSD) https://bsdrp.net/
* DD-WRT (Linux) https://dd-wrt.com/
* SecurityRouter (OpenBSD) https://securityrouter.org/wiki/Main_Page
* Sophos XG Home Edition or UTM Home Edition (https://secure2.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools.aspx)
* VyOS (Linux) https://vyos.io/
Then there is rolling your own with FreeBSD, OpenBSD, or something like Alpine Linux.
Yes, I heard pfSense folks were not nice to open source / free usage of their software.
Anyway, I had started with maintaining my CentOS router, then OpenWRT on TPLink hardware, to pfSense on custom Intel i5, to Unifi Security Gateway (which is another Linux).
My next experiment will be OPNSense on ESXi on Supermicro C2758. I had that board for another project, and it should fit nicely.
But the bottom line is, it is very time consuming to work on the home network. If I were to do this again, and I were not actually enjoying tinkering with hardware, I would have just bought whatever mesh AP product was best rated, and not worry about the details.