So I received my spanking new, beautiful PlayBook yesterday and after playing with it for a while, I noticed some really bad wi-fi drop-outs.
i.e., the wireless network would show as connected but nothing would work… the browser wouldn’t load, App World would complain and pings would fail. The only way you can get it to work again is to turn the wi-fi off and back on again.
The operating system I have had this issue on is the latest as of this post (1.0.7.2670).
If you have a DD-WRT powered router then you already know how powerful and feature-full it is, compared to a standard out-of-the-box ISP provided router.
This article will be about making use of the features that DD-WRT provides out of the box, as well as some other ‘hacks’ we can use to boost the wireless signal in your home or office.
The ones I will talk about today are as follows (in order of usefulness and ease):
In one of my recent articles, I explained how I set-up a guest wireless network for our work place (after getting it to work with the right wireless channel :))
After configuring the guest access point, I set up the DNS servers to point to OpenDNS in order to provide a safer and faster DNS service (compared to the default DNS servers our ISP provides) as well as choosing what web-sites should be allowed on the network.
For example, bandwidth hogging (Media/Video Sharing) and other web-sites which could potentially be used for illicit purposes (P2P/File Sharing) are forbidden on the network.
However, without any firewall rules on the router itself, it would still be possible for a guest on the network to change their DNS settings on their wireless adapter to point to any other DNS server; effectively bypassing all OpenDNS filters on the network for that specific client.
With DD-WRT, you can set-up DNS-O-Matic so that your services stay updated with your IP changes as soon as they happen.
This article will very quickly go through the process of setting DNS-O-Matic on your DD-WRT powered router.
This article will serve as a quick tutorial on installing TCPDump on a LinkSys WRT54GL box running the custom DD-WRT firmware.
TCPDump is a command line packet analyser. It’s a bit like Wireshark except it is command line based and in this tutorial, we will be installing it on a router and not on a PC.