Alston Grove

Every so often, a piece of hardware with modest popularity and unrealized potential is catapulted into infamy when it is hacked. People hack it and make it do things beyond its original design. That is definitely the case with the series of wireless routers from Linksys. I originally bought my Linksys WRT54G to free my laptop from its twisted-pair tether and to act as a firewall for my network. It quickly reached limitations, however, and I dedicated a PC to running Endian firewall (based on IPCop) instead.

Years passed, and now I am tired of listening to the whine of PC fans that saturate my living space. I have built out a home network with multiple machines as a kind of lab playground. It’s been fun and educational, but now I’d like less noise and clutter. The FitPC is an interesting little system running on AMD Geode and Linux, with a small profile and no fans. The mini-ITX systems at Mini Box are also interesting. Everyone seems to be getting in on the action, with the “mini computer” category on NewEgg.

And then a friend pointed out that I have the perfect hardware under my nose. It just needs an upgrade of its software. So I took the plunge and installed the open source DD-WRT on my old Linksys router. Setup is easy. The user interface is more sophisticated and informative. And there are enough knobs and dials to keep any hacker happy. It simply blows away the old software.

Now that I have saved a little power and made things a little quieter, I wonder what can I do about this noisy computer sitting on my desk? We’ll have to see about that.