I finally have Internet access at home once again. It’s been a long 6 months without having Internet access, that is for sure. You never realize how much you use something till it’s gone…well, I knew I would miss the Net, but I didn’t think about having trouble buying stuff and paying bills on-line. Luckily, I did have web access at work and at my parent’s house so I could make those necessary payments.

I just wanted to write this quick post to let everyone know that I’m back up and running. I’ve been configuring my network for the last couple of days. When everything is set up I should have a really, really cool home network. I plan on sharing some tutorials along the way so you too can have a similar setup.

Basically, I currently have my own cable modem running to wireless router. Pretty basic, but I have a ton of powerful options with my router because I flashed the firmware with a really cool and feature-packed open source firmware. The firmware has tons of options that you usually only find on very expensive wireless routers.

For instance, I can provision different network bandwidth priorities to different applications/protocols; something known as Quality of Service (QOS). QOS is very useful is you use VOIP because it allows you to guarantee a certain bandwidth to VOIP by slowing down less important services such as BitTorrent.

I can also use my router as a VPN server so that I can securely access my computer from any where on the Internet. Of course, the router also supports services such as dyndns which allows to access your home network via a domain name even though you don’t have a static IP address. One other practical feature for the everyday user is the ability to increase the default signal power of the router. Many manufactures run the power much lower than the hardware can support.

Do you want to know what firmware and router I’m using because you can’t wait till I get my tutorials out to set up your own? I’m using the dd-wrt firmware on a Linksys WRT54GL.

The L on the end of WRT54L is important because it stands for Linux. Because this version of the router uses Linux, Linksys publishes the source code. Published source code makes developing open source firmware much easier. I understand that older versions (v4.0 and older) of the extremely popular WRT54G also used Linux although the newest versions do not and aren’t compatible with this firmware (as far as I know).

Several other routers are also compatible. See Supported Devices page on the dd-wrt Wiki. One note of caution, be very careful and follow all directions for your specific router exactly when flashing your firmware or you may risk bricking the router.

Well, I better go so I can start writing these tutorials and configure my own network to take advantage of more of the tools available via dd-wrt firmware.