Being a homeowner is fun. There’s all sorts of things to do and learn when you own a house. Most projects require things like paint, wood, hammers, pipes, screwdrivers, drills and so on. Recently, though, I embarked on a project involving home networking and attempting save as much money as I could.
My dilemma was as follows. When Dena and I moved into our house last month, Rogers was ready to move our digital cable TV and broadband Internet service on the day after our closing date. On the basement floor is a room that we designated as the office. Yet the ceiling downstairs is finished and we have no drop ceilings either. The cable’s point of entry was into the only room downstairs without a finished ceiling – the laundry room. Running coax or Ethernet cable from the laundry room to the office sight unseen was impossible. So I left the cable modem in the laundry room, hooked it up to my Linksys BEFSX41 router and then plugged my Linksys WAP54G into the router. My Inspiron 6400 laptop was ok to use the wireless connection, but my poor desktop in the office had no Internet/network connectivity. I didn’t want to resort to purchasing a PCI wireless network card or a (yuk) USB wireless adapter. What if I have other computers in that office? What if the other computers aren’t running Windows and drivers for other operating systems are scarce? What if they’re not computers at all, but perhaps something else like a NAS device. What I need is a device to bridge the wireless connection in the laundry room to the office. What I need is a (appropriately named) network bridge. There are wireless bridges available, such as the Linksys WET54G, but they’ll damage your wallet to the tune of over $100.
Enter DD-WRT; a Linux-based 3rd-party firmware that’s compatible with several wireless routers. One such router is the nearly ubiquitous Linksys WRT54G. I used DD-WRT on the WRT54G in Dena’s office at work to correct some sync and transmit power issues that were caused by a multitude of interfering wireless networks in the vicinity – it allowed me to changes settings that the Linksys firmware didn’t make available. So I picked up a shiny new WRT54G from Futureshop for a mere $50. I flashed the WRT54Gs firmware with DD-WRT, which makes me ineligible for support from Linksys and voids its warranty, but it’s the price to pay for turning a wireless router into a wireless bridge on the cheap. 🙂 Here’s what the network layout in my house looks like now:
Since the WRT54G includes a built-in 4-port switch, I can plug other devices in like another desktop/laptop, NAS device or even another switch. DD-WRT gets two thumbs way up from me. Once the 802.11n standard is ready to go and I can buy compliant access points and routers, hopefully DD-WRT will be able to help me build another bridge 🙂
