[ILUG] OpenWRT or DD-WRT

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Sun, 24 Aug 2008, Niall O Broin wrote:

> OpenWRT seems to be a very flexible solution, allowing you to build an  
> embedded system which does exactly what you want, but requiring some  
> work to decide what exactly THAT is. DD-WRT OTOH seems to be more  
> focussed on just making a better and more configurable AP out of the  
> hardware, which is more or less what I want to do (the rationale for  
> replacing the existing AP is that it's flaky, requiring regular reboots, 
> and if I can also squeeze a little more range out of the replacement 
> device, that'd be nice too).

We use WAP-54Gs in Griffith College. We were using the default and in the
past 4-6 months have started using DD-WRT.  The main reason was that it
explicitly stated support for the WAP-54G, whereas OpenWRT hinted at it.
We didn't want bricks and hadn't any great wish to build our own firmware
so the DD-WRT was what we tried first.  

We are pretty happy with them. They're generally stable and far more
configurable (the WAP-54G default firmware is particularly restrictive).

One word of caution.  We seem to have destabilised two of them by
increasing the transmission power.  It was suggested in the docs that we
could safely increase it to a certain value (I can't recall exactly what).
It turns out that this wasn't so safe and those devices we tried it on now
crash now and then so we've had to stop using them.  We were using it in
the library, so those points were really busy which might explain why
others got away with it in and we didn't.

We monitor them with nagios.  We started off checking they responded to
pings and http requests.  We kept getting intermittent failures on the http
so ended up just using ping to monitor them as the http failures didn't
seem to indicate a problem in practice.  

The WAP-54Gs sadly can't do snmp usefully (apparently due to lack of
storage space?).  I suspect we might go for the WRT versions instead in
future as that would be a very useful feature to have.  It's possible using
openwrt would allow us to use snmp, so we must look into it some time.

Gavin