India Broadband Forum

knight

I've asked a number of retailers about this router, but none of them
seem to have it.

I've heard the same thing from a few other guys also.

The linksys model most people seem to be selling is WRH54g.
Is that the same as WRT54g?

And what's the difference between WRT54g and WRT54g2?


Thanks.

goodyet

I don't know whethet it's available or not. But if you are thinking of flashing your router with open source firmwares like tomato, dd-wrt, then you can go for Bufallo whr-hp-g54. It is available. It's chip is same as Linksys wrt54g. But the current version of Linksys wrt54g (v.8 or someting) doesn't support full featured open source firmwares. But both WRT54g and WHR-hp-54 are not ADSL routers. They are just WAN routers.

knight

@goodyet

Thanks for that info. Repped you.

I believe the main issue with choosing a router is that:

a) all routers seems to have extremely positive and extremely disappointing
reviews at the same time, which makes the task even more confusing

b) dealers in India don't have a return policy of any kind, so if the model you picked
isn't working like expected, you just have to throw it in the garbage.

goodyet

Yes, that's absolutely right. Check out the following link MyOpenRouter : The Premier Online Community for NETGEAR's WNR3500L & WGR614L Open Source Router - DD-WRT, OpenWRT, & Tomato Firmware Its a WAN router and looks pretty impressive. The site says you can use most of the open source firmwares available. But the original openwrt, tomato sites don't say anything about the router mentioned. But I have used Buffallo whr-hp-54 with tomato. It is the most amazing firmware i've come across. If you are planning to buy a ADSL 2+ open source firmware compatible router then you can check try Netgear DG834GT. The following link has more info.

Any Thing Under The Sun: Netgear DG834GT Hacking.

But if you get a adapter with plug made for UK (flat pins), then you better be careful. I t is not suitable for Indian power system, you may face frequent reboots. I have a Netgear DG834G and I am facing the same problem.

knight

@goodyet

Thanks again for the info.

The truth is, the very thought of buying ANOTHER Netgear router
makes me a bit apprehensive... for I have been burned once already
and even their support couldn't find a solution to my problem
even after eating up 40 days of my time.

And talking about firmwares...

Does it make a big difference -- having a firmware with more features?

goodyet

Yes, it will certainly. If you are facing frequent disconnections, because of low SNR, you can make your ADSL router more stable. Open source firmwares give you access to some hidden features of your router e.g. wake up on lan, traffic shaping, bandwidth monitoring, etc. People instead of buying costly routers (wich have all those features) they buy open source firmware compatible cheap routers to get those features.

On this forum there are lots of threads discussing how to port forward on different routers, different routers have different ways of doing it. But if you use tomato firmware you don't have to port forward at all, it does it automatically.

Tomato even acts as a DNS server, so instead of specifying DNS servers on your comps network settings, if you just type routers ip address where you usually entre DNS server ips, and the rest it'll take care off. If you want use a different DNS server, assuming you have a large network, you can just change the DNS server ips on the router. You can also use internal domain names to reach an internal server or node (e.g. mycollection.home), so that users do not have to remember the ips.

knight

Wow!

That's actually amazing and scary at the same time!

I have a pretty good understanding of computers and computer hardware
but when it comes to wireless routers and their operation, I'm still a novice.


Thanks.