Updated the Home Network

I have a decent drive to and from work each day.  During the commute I listen to .Net Rocks, NPR Podcasts and Hanselminutes to help pass the time.  A recent edition of Hanselminutes (show 66: Setting up a Home Network) Scott and Carl discussed an alternate firmware for the Linksys WRT54G.  Scott has posted about this previously on his blog.  I had been having a few problems with the home network and decided it was time to try something new.

My wife has an iPAQ that she uses and she had stopped wirelessly syncing it with the computer because it always had problems getting on the network.  At first I thought it was the device, but then my laptop seemed to constantly have issues reacquiring an IP when it came out of hibernate or sleep.  Sometimes the DHCP server on my router would just stop handing out IP addresses at all and I’d have to cycle the power on it.  It was time to see if the updated firmware would solve my issues and give me more features.

I selected the DD-WRT firmware and flashed the router.  Turned out that the router decided not to show me the “updated” page after the update so for a while there I thought I bricked it.  One short reset later and I was in business. 

The UI for the firmware took a minute to get used to, but overall I really like the capabilities.  The main thing I wanted to use the alternate firmware for was the ability to centralize the leasing of IP addresses.  With this firmware I can assign a specific IP address to a device based on MAC address.  This means that my laptop always gets the same IP address every time it’s on the network, but it gets it assigned from DHCP on the router, not from a static setting on the machine. 

I found that I have eleven different things in the house that need an IP!  I wouldn’t have guessed that many, but things add up quickly:  My laptop (one for the wired and one for wireless), the Media Center Machine, the Media Center Extender, my test server, two routers (one wireless access point and the main router), two PDAs (an iPAQ and a HTC Wizard), the Xbox 360 and the Mirra Server.

Since I’ve put the different firmware on the router I’ve not seen one problem.  My laptop gets its IP address immediately when coming out of sleep or hibernate and the iPAQ doesn’t constantly ask for the wireless security key anymore.  I haven’t had to recycle the router once. Nice!