Thursday, April 3, 2008

Router upgrade project

My aging DI-524 had to go for the following reasons:

  1. I was having really patchy WiFi connectivity on the second level at less than 5mbps stable and near zero signal on the third.
  2. The LAN ports cannot be configured as switched WAN port for my MioTV connection to work.
  3. It does not come with VPN gateway feature for road warrior access.
  4. It does not do WPA2 for WiFi security. (lesser concern but heck, I needed more reasons)
To address point 1, I could have extended my WiFi coverage by installing an additional Wireless Repeater or another Wireless Access Point (WAP) connected to my router via HomePlug. Both options however, are more costly to implement compared to upgrading the DI-524 to a MIMO based 802.11g WiFi router.

Oh, and 802.11n is out too as both router and adapters (all my client machines will have to upgrade to 802.11n capable WiFi adapters) are very expensive at this point hence making it the most costly option.

My choice of replacement is really limited due to the fact that I want to run DD-WRT on it. It boils down to a second-hand Linksys WRT54G (newer versions that are available for sale over retail channels are not compatible due to changes in hardware architecture) or a new Buffalo WHR-HP-G54. I chose the latter (only S$99!) for its built-in amplifier which technically should help to reduce the number of dead-zones in the house.

Now that the easy part is over, its time to get it set up in my environment:
  1. Flashing WHR-HP-G54 with DD-WRT
  2. Setting up MioTV connection
  3. Setting up VPN for road warrior access
  4. Setting up site-to-site bridged VPN to connect with my parents LAN

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