Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

I have a problem with wifi routers. I don’t know why it is, maybe I abuse them too much. But I’ve gone through a few routers over the last year. At AdMob we had the same kinds of problems, wifi routers would just do odd things. They would just stop routing, or slow down to a crawl after a while. This one that I had at home last started “stuttering” when I connected to IM. It would stop routing packets for about 70 seconds when I connected to IM. I verified that I wasn’t crazy by running a ping to an external site from another machine while I connected to IM from this one. Sure enough there were a bunch of dropped packets right when I connected. Why? No idea.

Russ jokes that I have inverse technical ability - the more complex something is the more likely it is that I’ll get it working. And for some reason, the less complex it is, the more likely it is to cause problems for me. So naturally it would seem the right way to solve this simple technical issue of getting a base networking component to just route packets for me would be to make it more complex. So I was going to dig out one of my old Linux systems, put two network cards in it, and configure it as my router.

However, I also noticed that Linksys WRT54GL routers are on sale. The Linksys WRT54G was the router that folks hacked to run Linux, but then Linksys changed the design so that they could run VxWorks instead. The WRT54GL version is the old version, brought back by Linksys cause there was a lot of vocal support for the design from the hackers.

What’s this? A way to run Linux on my router using a platform and distribution system I’ve never even touched before? Well that’s sure to work! I just tried it out today, and it did:

Actually took less time to get this router working than it did to get the last commercial router swap working last time I decided to try a new bit of kit. Looks like Russ’s theory might have some legs.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 3:41 pm and is filed under Community, Open Source, Technology, ThisIsMobility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.