DD-WRT for the win!

Today I was faced with a difficult wireless networking scenario: looooong house, many thick walls.

The topography is as follows:
Comp A <--- 200 ft., 4 walls ---> Router <--- 150 ft., 3 walls ---> Comp B

The house is older so the walls are very, very solid and RF-absorbing. The old setup involved a Linksys WRT54GX (802.11 b/g) as the router in the middle, a Belkin Wireless-N PCMCIA card on computer A, and a Belkin Wireless-N PCI card on computer B. After many attempts to reposition the wireless adapter’s antennas on computer B with no success I suggested hooking up a WRT54G in client bridging mode (using DD-WRT) to act as the wireless adapter on computer B. Worked like a champ. The signal is now strong and the connection hasn’t dropped one single time.

The kicker is that the WRT54G I used is version 8.2 which has very little RAM and doesn’t support the standard method of upgrading the firmware to DD-WRT.

The Solution

1. Download TFTP.
2. Download the VX Work Killer firmware for the WRT54G v8.2
3. Download the dd-wrt.v24_micro_wrt54gv8.bin firmware for the WRT54G v8.2
4. Upload the vxworkskillerGv8-v3.bin firmware to the router.
5. Wait for the router to reboot.
6. Try to ping the router (192.168.1.1 by default).
7. When you can ping the router continue to the next step.
8. Open a command prompt and enter
   “tftp -i 192.168.1.1 put dd-wrt.v24_micro_wrt54gv8.bin“
9. If all went well, when the router reboots it will have DD-WRT on it and be accessible via 192.168.1.1.
10. Username: “root”
11. Password: “admin”

Source

The connection on computer A is also weak so I’ll be adding a WRT54G to the mix to fix it.

Thank you DD-WRT!