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Fire up your router
You don’t have to stick with your router’s proprietary firmware…
As well as the proprietary offerings by router manufacturers, there are plenty of open A source options that may be able to replace your existing and likely forgotten about – in terms of software updates – firmware. When considering the options, make sure you spend enough time looking at the relevant websites for information about your specific device. A lot of devices can be upgraded by using the existing firmware update functionality. Some devices, such as this author’s old router, would require soldering and connecting to a UART (serial) device. This was a step too far and the option was quickly turned down.
Back in the early 2000s, Linksys had a popular router, the WRT54G, whose firmware was released under an open source licence. This code was forked and several community projects were started. The first of these was OpenWRT, which has been around since 2004. DD-WRT is another version, which has been around since 2005. Tomato then followed in 2006. All three of these options are still being developed, with Freshtomato being the currently updated version of Tomato. All three options offer similar functionality, with the GUI of Freshtomato being the most pleasant to interact with. We will be looking at OpenWRT and using the x86 download to test the software in a virtual machine, so we can assess its suitability.