More Power!
I am so glad I did buy the Linksys WRT54G… Today I’ve spent some minutes and installed the batbox tools on my router. It is running Linux and after some tweaking you can log in and add software as you like. Which is so cool!
The batbox distribution does only support Linux and MacOSX. So I just booted my Knoppix CD, dragged the batbox onto the desktop and did run the wrt54g.sh script. After a few seconds the java client installed the software onto the router and …voila! I was able to login.
This all works through a bug of their web interface. (Yeah, yeah, yeah …you better be careful what you do with request parameters!) In the new firmware this bug was supposed to be fixed. But their fix was …well – not optimal :) So it worked for me although I’ve upgraded the firmware to US 1.4.23 (because of the broken dyndns support in earlier versions).
Now if you look into this little linux system you find all kinds of stuff. A mini webserver, a cron daemon (how cool is that!) and some tools to control the hardware settings. After some research I found that you can adjust the transmission power. Usually it comes with a default of 19mW but you can tune it up to 84mW! But there is a good chance you fry your router with that. Anyway I heart that 48mW should be reasonable and so this little command gave me some more power:
Hope my router is doing ok with it. And I am very curious to try out some more tools. Especially a socks proxy would be nice. And I am not yet sure what to do with a cron daemon on my router …it’s definitly an exciting toy :)
# /usr/sbin/wl -i eth2 txpwr 48