Cisco/Linksys Fail - A Follow-up

After spending an hour getting an old-skool wired router in place to serve up my internet since the Cisco/Linksys crap died, I was still fuming over the entire router failure thing. I fired up the old browser and hit up Google to see if any other lucky bastards were seeing the same fate. Apparently, I'm not alone. I guess I should consider myself lucky that mine wasn't jacked up out of the box. Well, enough rambling, I've got good news.

I came across the dd-wrt website. What's dd-wrt, you ask? Their site says... DD-WRT is a Linux based alternative OpenSource firmware suitable for a great variety of WLAN routers and embedded systems. I though, what the heck? The worst I could do is brick my broken router. I followed the instructions to permanently remove the Cisco/Linksys code and install the open-source stuff. After a little back door telnet action to fix a hung log-in webpage everything went off without a hitch. There are more configuration options on one page than in the entire previous Cisco/Linksys build! I just want to create vlans and virtual access points for the hell of it. Oh, and that pesky WAN that wouldn't resolve a DHCP to the i'net... yeah, it works great now. It even has monitoring tools and I was pulling a pretty solid stream from the net.

Of course, this all means that it was the Cisco/Linksys firmware that was faulty the whole time. It's almost as if those bastards 'fail' hardware so they can sell more. It's obvious now that the flash was no effective in clearing the NVRAM which was causing this whole fiasco. What sucks even more is that the hard reset didn't do it either. I can't believe a group of unpaid guys can make firmware that fixes all the shortcomings of the factory while they're just "screwing around." Imagine if these bastards were paid by Cisco... well, maybe they'd get beat down like the old Linksys folks did when they got bought. Well, Cisco, looks like your hardware just needed better software.