Techezy.com

Time for our second Tech-howto: Routers.

Now you may be sitting with your d-link or netgear, or even linksys router thinking ‘my router works fine’; but most likely, you are incorrect; either your resetting it too often, or the firewall menu is frustratingly limited or difficult to navigat, or maby the router itself is just not fast enough to route the traffic that your bringing in making it a bottleneck in your network speeds.

This guide will take you through what router to get, and then, what to do with it. I will go over specific firewall configurations in greater detail in another article.

Routers you can get:

-Linksys WRT-54GL; note the L at the end of that; nothing else will really do if you need to buy a brand new router, its the only one made by linksys (now cisco systems) that has enough memory to load the biggest custom firmwares.

-Buffalo WHR-HP-G54; note, this router may not be available in the US for much longer due to lawsuit.

You may be asking ‘what about my wireless-N buzzword d-link obscenity that costs $400?’, I hate to burst your bubble, but it’s likely crap and does not deliver the stable performance of either of the above routers.

So you buy one of those routers, and notice immediately that it is in fact working better, but the interface is still crap, and torrents still do weird things, and perhaps you’ve got a laptop on the top floor and the router is in the basement and if you could just get say 15 feet more range on 4 bars of connection everything would be great. Well your in luck, one of the big benefits of those routers is the ability to load customer firmware onto them. (Other routers support this too, but don’t have the excellent cost/performance of the above two).

Here are the sites for routers that support custom firmware:

http://wiki.openwrt.org/TableOfHardware - openwrt supported devices

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_Devices - dd-wrt supported devices

http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato - tomato supported devices.

If you don’t know why I listed three different compatibility charts, then you are only interested in the tomato supported devices.

Basically there are three major distributions of custom firmware (custom firmware is a linux based router operating system; replacing the restrictive operating system that’s on the router and replacing it with one that has features like ‘increase wireless signal strength’ and ‘change clock rate of CPU’ )

Installing custom firmware is easy and relatively painless, just got the site in question, download the firmware for the router in question, go to the routers interface, and select ‘update’ then select the firmware file that you downloaded. Click update, and your router will soon restart into the new firmware. Be VERY sure to do this through an Ethernet interface on a stable computer, and not over wireless; if the connection breaks part way through there is a chance that you will break the router, repairing from this is not nearly as easy as simply installing the custom firmware.

Security: Ok, you now have some snazzy custom firmware and are experincing untold levels of reliability and speed. But you want your neighbors to stop mooching over your wireless connection and want to make sure that your fancy new linux machine (since that’s what the custom firmware turns a router into) does not get hacked and turned into some botnet hacking the united states department of national defense

1- Put a password on your router, use a good one, like T2pOs5E notice how it uses upper and lowercase letters AND numbers interchangeably- write this down somewhere- on paper; a sticky note on the side of your monitor is fine, you want to secure your traffic against outside influence, anyone already seated at your computer who wants to compromise your router can reset the password by doing a hard reset on it.

2- Secure your wireless; there are only two options for wireless security, turn it off, or use WPA2 with TKIP and AES coupled with a strong password like above (but not the SAME as above)

Firewall :

So you have a beautifully stable, secure router; but you’d like to use torrents and not have all of them complain that you don’t have your ports open. This is a simple setup to get e-donkey and utorrent working on your machine.

First- click on start->run type ‘cmd’ and then type ‘ipconfig’- note the result; there should be a number along the lines of ‘192.168.<something>.<something>’ write that number down, your about to need it.

Go to the router’s firewall configuration page; and you want to make something simmilar to below:

Destination ports: 23840-23940	192.168.X.Y		Up Down	Edit Delete
Destination ports: 45132	192.168.X.Y		Up Down	Edit Delete
Destination ports: 53220	192.168.X.Y		Up Down	Edit Delete

Those open ports are in order:

1-Utorrent’s range of ports

2-E-donkey

3- KAD

I could go into more details with any of these setup tips, but to do so would ruin having an article that basically anyone could follow, there are dozens of resources out there for further configuration options, but the above setup will get you going to a world of routing with very few pickups and random drops, and having to reset your router every X period of time.