Ever wanting to keep up with the other hackers on the street, I recently decided to upgrade my 802.11b network to run 802.11g. Toward that end, I purchased a Linksys WRT54GS router, largely based upon a rather silly feature: it’s actually a full Linux device, and you can develop and reflash it without huge difficulty. Here is the most lucid description of the procedure I’ve found. Note: I have not yet done this on mine, and doing so will likely void your warranty, so be aware.

Why would you want to reflash your router? I can think of several reasons:

• It would be nice if it booted with the defaults that I like: with the ports for ssh and httpd forwarded to my desired host, the correct SSID and WEP keys enabled and so on.
• I use sitelutions.com for my dynamic dns stuff, it would be great if it could update all of my hosted domains automatically.
• It could be nice to have traffic shaping to keep my son from chewing up all my bandwidth.

Anyway, I haven’t done any of this yet, but someday when I am bored I’m virtually certain to give it a whirl.