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LinkSys Router WRT54G

Today I finally bought myself a LinkSys WRT54G router (the company is now owned by Cisco), to replace my aging Belkin wirelles router, which could only do 802.11b (which means 11Mbps). This new router can do wireless speeds up to 54 Mbps using 802.11g.

I’ve heard great things about the router, especially in combination with 3rd party firmware upgrades. I’ll be checking that out in the near future.

I have bought the very latest V3 of the WRT54G which also has the official V3 linksys firmware installed (3.03.1) – none of the 3rd party websites even mention V3 of the firmware or hardware !! So for now I’ll wait a bit and start reading up on the different firmwares and their capabilities and compare them to the factiry firmware installed.

So far, it seems that LinkSys has incorporated quite a few of the ‘hacks’ that were doing the rounds, like the ‘ping’ hack I read on the sveasoft support forum.

After a small struggle to follow the superduper friendly installation wizard, which assumes you are doing this for the very first time, I closed it. Kudos to the wizard for finding out I was cheating though – it correctly identified that I had already connected the router to the pc and the cable modem.

As I was not installing a router for the first time but rather replacing it, I figured I could handle it and went through the setup manually. This worked better than the wizard, in just a few minutes my net connection was back up.

Now I’m going to try for the difficult part – setting up the wireless network with encryption. Always fun with an apple computer which just has to have it’s wep keys entered differently than others …

Update : that was easy ! For the mac lovers out there, connect via a (wired) pc/mac to the router’s interface, activate wireless security, choose WPA Shared key (TKIP, and not AES) and type in your secret phrase. On the mac, you don’t get a choice, just WPA personal. Type in the exact same phrase, clicking ‘add to keychain’. That’s it, surf’s up !!

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