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We recently had a storm come through that knocked out our cable internet for a day. Adding to the torture of being without internet for almost the whole weekend, my router started to wig out when the connection did come back up. I was able to plug my machine directly to the modem, and get a connection, but I got nothing when connected to my Linksys WRT54G.

I spent way too much time trying to get the issue sorted out and it turned out to be a sporadic problem. When everything was lined up just right I sometimes would get the router to act properly. Even when I did get a connection to the internet established, I could never get port forwarding working. I was starting to suspect maybe my ISP was blocking ports, but I couldn’t find anyone complaining out that on any forums. I’ve been using this router for a few years with my previous DSL connection and it worked like a champ, so this whole issue was very frustrating.

Quite a while back I had heard about the DD-WRT project and was really impressed by it. Well, now with nothing to loose, I decided to flash my router with the DD-WRT firmware.

The whole process was really painless. I just followed the instructions for my specific router and I didn’t have any problems. The web interface is really slick and adds a ton of functionality that’s not in the factory firmware. One of the first things I noticed was a setting for “STP” and the help text says to “Disable for Comcast ISP.’ Hmm… interesting. I finished the configuration and I was up and running right away. I even got the port forwarding turned on without any problems.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 9:58 pm and is filed under Networking, Computers, Electronics. 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.