Hacking the WRT55AG **Again** now a media bridge
With everything going on lately its been hard to find some time to geek out but I had a friend call me this evening wondering how we are going to get internet up in the UP on our snowmobile trip. Last year we picked up a bridge and was able to pull in a wireless signal from a neighbor so that we have VOIP service and some web service to check up on work. It worked pretty well but we looked like true geeks when you walked into the house to see a ton of wires all over the place with laptops hooked up and phone bridges.
I was looking around a little and figured I would start to play with some of my Linksys gear again and install some new firmware.
Tonight I pulled out a few routers and started to play …
I have a few WRT54GAG routers at home that I don\’t use anymore as I updated to all Cisco – so time to build a lab.
We have done this in the past bridging two buildings together when we outgrew our old office and needed some extra room for some developers. We spent a lot of time playing with antennas and configurations however in the end got it working alright for the time. (However I do remember an Ethernet wire that ran across the parking lot that we used for a while =)
For the most part its very straight forward … simply follow the following directions .. \r\n
http://aruljohn.com/info/linksys/
I had this set up in the past at home as a bridge but about a year ago I started to play with getting a phone server installed on this … it worked however moving to Cisco SIP phones I didn’t have much of a need for it … now it will be a neighborhood hotspot so that I can get back into my network to share music when I am over at someone’s party. (I have 600+ CD\’s ripped – nice little jukebox)
If you haven’t done this in a while, they have made some strong advancements … the official site is located here http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv3/index.php
This year we have a little more control over the power on the unit, a better bridge, VPN, QoS and so on … it should be a much better setup …
