DD-WRT impresses again!

A while ago I posted how I was really annoyed with D-Link, and I moved our traffic to the DD-WRT (using a Linksys WRT54GL).

I’m running the BETA version of DD-WRT, and looking through it, this firmware package just gets better and better.

They’ve removed Samba, and swapped to CIFS (common internet file system), which is more flexible anyway, as it allows better connection of Network Attached Storage devices, and the like.

This was relatively new to the featureset, and did take a bit of digging to get setup correctly, so I’ll help by posting the settings you need for connecting (not easy to find):

In the Administration > Management tabs, at the very bottom, enable Common Internet File System
In share name, type in server and share names.

For the example, your server is at IP “192.168.1.32” and the share is named “Greedy”.
In the share name, you would enter:
//192.168.1.32/Greedy

In the Username field, for Samba (linux machines), enter the username you would connect as. This example is assuming the username ‘nobody’
In the username field, you would enter:
nobody

If you have a Windows box, named slowbox, the situation SHOULD be a little different, I assume you would enter:
//SLOWBOX/UserName

In the password field, use some common sense in setting up a common internet file system, and enter the password.

Start scripts are only necessary if you need to get some actions performed to start sharing. This isn’t necessary for Samba in my case.

Save settings, and when the router has finished saving settings, if all is right, you should see the line below display total / free space.

This exciting feature would allow for a multiude of features.
Custom Application Development, and dynamic system extension / configuration, among other things.

But wait, just when you thought this router was too good, they throw in yet more.

Bandwidth monitoring, a feature still in development in the router, is bandwidth monitoring, but that’s fine, another feature I’m eyeing off is rstats, which should log stats to my samba share every hour for later analysis and peicing together for monitoring.

It also features RFlow / Macupd, but I don’t really want to set those up if the rstats feature will provide me all the information I need.

I plan to make some RRD graphs up, and display some great stats!

I’m entirely impressed with this software, and it’s still in BETA, so, there is plenty more to be going ahead.

Oh, it’s open source too, so if I find the time, I might pull it apart, and remove some of the features, and add a feature to disable the wireless radio, as well as a few other custom ideas i’ve got going locally.

It’d be good to see development of consumer routers like this take some ground. The DD-WRT software seemingly is maintained by a German developer, who seems to have pulled a few apart and got to know them intimately. If Linksys put this sort of software out for their own retail routers, they’d be in a new grade of consumer networking!

Anyway, that’s all for now, I’ve got some great enhancements for OzVoIPStatus coming soon, must stop configuring already configured router, and get to finishing those features!