Treblog

Well the people over at dd-wrt.com finally finalised their popular 3rd party router firmware v24. After several release candidates and numerous builds they are happy with their hard work. Too bad they lost me as a faithful user...

I switched to Tomato. Currently running Tomato 1.19-SpeedMod on my WRT54GL. Tomato suits my needs, I will not be going back to DD-WRT.

Our laptop had become polluted with al kinds of stuff over the past few years. Windows' Wireless Zero Config wasn't functioning properly anymore, though it would still connect wirelessly to our WRT54GL. Recently Wendy noted that the speed of a wireless connection became very very slow. So I spent yesterday reinstalling our laptop.

Like most PC users will agree, a freshly installed runs better, smoother, faster. I was hoping that a freshly installed Windows XP would resolve the problems. So after installing XP SP2, and loads and loads of updates and even more updates our cleaned laptop is humming along nicely. Windows' Wireless Zero Config works as advertised again but the speed of a wireless connection was still appaling. So who or what's to blame? I flashed back the WRT54GL with v24 RC5 to check if that would do the trick. It didn't. Bloody hell! By now I'm running out of "solutions" very quickly. So off go the HGA7T antennas and on go the stock 2 dBi anttennas. Crancked the Xmit to 63 mW to compensate for loss of antenna gain. Nothing. Connection speed at our dining room table is grinding to a halt. Damn.
But wait, in our living room and the study connection speed is excellent... A quick walkabout with the laptop downloading a very large dummy file of 500 Megs over FTP reveals that the problem is only present at the dining room table... So what do I make of that? Well I'm pretty sure there's another wireless access point nearby (probably in the nextdoor appartment) that's the cause of our problems. The nextdoor access point is broadcasting on channel 11 while I've set the WRT54GL on channel 1. I thought that would avoid interference. Probably that's not the case.

So the solution is not to sit at the dining room table with the laptop, much cheaper than buying a WiFi spectrum analyser to really identify the location and problem.

I installed my friends WRT54GL yesterday. I unplugged his old BEFW11S4 and hooked up his new WRT54GL running DD-WRT. His laptop made connection with the WRT54GL without any troubles at all. I had configured his WRT54GL at my home to use WPA2-TKIP, WLAN MAC filtering, NIC MAC address clone, the works. Great to see it all worked out well.
After that I had some trouble to get his Vista-powered laptop and his old desktop PC running XP to see eachother in a network. Got it to work eventually and copied all files and photos to his laptop.