[lug] DD-WRT

[Nate Duehr]

Ken MacFerrin wrote:

> Nate,
> I have 3 WRT54G's and have bounced around between a couple of the 
> firmwares but never tried this one. A couple questions:
> 1. How much memory is this distro using during average load?
> 2. Have you tested out any of the QoS features?  Specifically VoIP QoS?
> -Ken

Mem: 10484K used, 19736K free, 0K shrd, 1392K buff, 3912K cached

This is on a WRT54GS v2.0 which has more memory overall than the v4.0 model.

Not sure what "average" load is for my house... when I'm home, the 
upstream link is usually maxed out doing SOMETHING... heh.

No, I'm not there right now.  ;-)

There's a couple of servers handing out webpages and mail services 
there... kinda running all day at what I would still call "light" load 
levels... 1000 messages a day on e-mail.  Probably similar load levels 
for Apache... nothing huge.

Have not had any chance to test QoS, but will have to shortly... been 
messing with Skype and Asterisk and finding that big traffic = big mess 
on the audio quality (of course).

It also (like most alternative firmware) gives access to RF power 
levels, the VLAN's in the internal switch, etc... haven't had much 
chance to play with that yet either -- it cracks me up that a four port 
switch chip can do VLAN's and VLAN tagging.  LOL.

I'm looking forward to sitting down and thinking about what I can do 
with all the new functionality that will make the network "better" 
without adding complexity... the design phase is fun, and for a cost of 
$0... (well, I should send a donation to the guy to support his WRT 
hacking fun... I don't like Sveasoft's model at all... might as well 
vote with my wallet)... it's looking like it'll add a lot of 
possibilities there.

Oh it also does WDS and encryption over WDS, which has me thinking about 
how to cover the neighborhood, but I don't think I want to get back into 
the data-center/ISP biz on the supremely low-end, really.  It also has 
Chilisoft support for captive portals, and one of their versions has 
more SIP routing tools... I loaded the "vpn" version which has OpenVPN 
built in.  That'll probably be the first thing I really play with... 
getting OpenVPN setups working to get into the internal network from afar...

Toys!  Gotta love Embedded Linux on a no-moving-parts box.

I hear that hardware hacks can allow things like USB audio, and real 
serial ports... I'm thinking that with some careful hardware hacking and 
the right (SMALL!) VoIP application, a Linksys router could become a 
2-way radio to Internet link!  Ooh, that'd be cool.

Nate