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Davesnothere
Change is NOT Necessarily Progress
Premium Member
join:2009-06-15
Canada

2 edits

Davesnothere to El Quintron

Premium Member

to El Quintron

Re: Router ALT Firmware for QoS for VoIP

said by El Quintron:

said by Davesnothere:

Recap : So I use the factory F/W to flash in the DD-WRT Mini, next use DD-WRT Mini to flash in the Tomato, then clear the NVRAM from within the Tomato GUI, and finally add my custom settings such as port forwards ?

That's how I did it, and I've never bricked a WRT54GL... others might want to chime in here, but it's a pretty though to brick unit.

 
Thanks - Good to hear.

I have read a fair bit on the DD-WRT site overnight and saw some major cautions & directives, many of which might well be applied to ANY firmware changing scenario.

The most notable one (besides being sure that you have a validated and correct firmware for your device) would seem to be doing this so-called '30-30-30 Hard Reset' »www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/inde ··· 30/30/30 of which they preach incessantly, before/after/between each firmware update.

Gone
Premium Member
join:2011-01-24
Fort Erie, ON

Gone

Premium Member

It has been my experience that the way they go on and on about a 30-30-30 is overkill, but it ultimately depends on the router. I've had to do 30-30-30s far more often with the M10s were use here than my WRT610N and WRT320N at home.

Davesnothere
Change is NOT Necessarily Progress
Premium Member
join:2009-06-15
Canada

4 edits

Davesnothere

Premium Member

 
....contd

So this morning I proceeded to put the DD-WRT Mini into there (v24 SP1 Stable Generic Mini), using the below steps :

(00) Save various instructional web pages to offline as suggested
(0) Make & save Screenshots of current router GUI config screens
(1) Download firmwares and confirm MD5 hashes
(2) Set router LAN IP to Linksys default 192.168.1.1 and a PC to a static IP on the same subnet
(3) Do a 30-30-30 Hard Reset of router
(4) Bring up router GUI again using default admin/admin
(5) Do firmware update to DD-WRT Mini from within factory GUI
(6) Log into router DD-WRT for 1st time, using default of admin/admin, IIRC
(7) Do a 30-30-30 Hard Reset of router
(8) Log into router DD-WRT, setting a new password when prompted
(9) Undo IP changes of (2) and log in again (Steps 2 and 9 are optional - not needed if you had always used default router IP)

Then I looked around in the GUI and began to reconstruct my other settings, WiFi, port forwards, etc.

All went well.

AND, I then noticed that DD-WRT Mini seems to include some QoS functionality !

SO, the $64,000 question now is :

Do I need to change to Tomato (or to the VoIP-named larger DD-WRT build), or will the QoS functions of this MINI be sufficient ?

From what I have noted so far, the QoS page in MINI looks like it just might be OK.

BTW, I did NOT clear my NVRAM so far - Should I still do that if I stay with DD-WRT-Mini ?

FiReSTaRT
Premium Member
join:2010-02-26
Canada

FiReSTaRT

Premium Member

I'd go with flashing to Tomato. Only done one flash through DD-WRT so I can't help you there as it's been A WHILE. Went the TFTP route ever since as it's a lot easier, especially from Linux.

El Quintron
Cancel Culture Ambassador
Premium Member
join:2008-04-28
Tronna

El Quintron to Davesnothere

Premium Member

to Davesnothere
said by Davesnothere:

From what I have noted so far, the QoS page in MINI looks like it just might be OK.

If it ain't broke... really that's up to you, I vastly prefer *anything* other than DD-WRT so I'm completely biased, if this works for you then you're probably good to go, until you need it to do something it currently doesn't.
said by Davesnothere:

BTW, I did NOT clear my NVRAM so far - Should I still do that if I stay with DD-WRT-Mini ?

It's usually a good idea to do so, or to do some sort of reset so that you don't have any leftover configs from previous incarnations. That being said, some DD-WRTs prefer the 30-30-30 over "clear nvram" so check your documentation.