upgrade u, dd-wrt

Tonight I installed the latest version of dd-wrt on my Linksys WRT54Gv3 and had some interesting glitches.

In theory, it should have all been very simple.  All I did was upgraded from v23 to v24, but for whatever reason shortly after the upgrade, none of my wireless devices could use DNS properly. I downgraded back down to v23 and everything seemed to be working fine for a while, but then about 2 hours later I got locked out of my router (for no particular reason).  I did a hard reset, upgraded to v24, and everything has worked quite smoothly since.

One of the main reasons I upgraded was to support virtual SSIDs, so now I can have multiple SSIDs, one broadcasted SSID with WPA for me, and another one not broadcasted with WEP for guests.  I believe one can choose *not* to bridge that other SSID to the other networks current network, but I have not tried that feature yet.

One of the cooler features of dd-wrt is QoS, and for whatever reason, QoS on v24 seems to be a lot more functional than previous versions.  Using v24’s QoS, I labeled all torrent traffic as BULK, then I classified DNS, IMAP, SMTP, POP, and HTTP traffic as EXPRESS. For good measure, I labeled ssh traffic and my iPhone’s MAC address as EXEMPT, so now checking email during torrent-ing takes only a fraction as long.

As a proof of concept, I’m torrenting like hell right now, and my somafm.com stream hasn’t even missed a beat — something unheard of until today!