So, I decide to be a little more proactive in keeping my wireless router firmware up to date and downloaded/installed the latest and greatest version from Linksys (I have an old WRT54G v2). In the fine, long-standing tradition of no good deed going unpunished, now my formerly rock-solid router loses it's mind every few days and refuses to route outside of the local network...meaning no internet. I can ping (and access) the router, but not beyond that. If I bypass the router and hook a PC up directly to the DSL box everything works fine. If I reset my router to factory settings, it all works again for a few days, but twice now I've had to reset and go around to all my wireless devices and re-configure them so that they can get out on the Internet (for some reason, the wireless settings won't work, even though they are unchanged). This is getting to be a real PITA. Checking the Linksys forums leads me to the sad conclusion that I'm not the only one experiencing this, but as far as I can tell there's no fix forthcoming.

Now, I can certainly go and drop another $50 or so on a new one, but I'm nothing if not frugal; and since I believe this is a firmware problem, not a problem with the hardware, I'm considering re-flashing my router with an open-source firmware (DD-WRT or Tomato). If this is how my router is going to be acting from now on, I've got nothing to lose by doing this. I've read a lot of good reviews on both (however, it appears that DD-WRT may be heading more into a commercial product in the future). I'm leaning toward Tomato.

Have any of you used either DD-WRT or Tomato (especially on a Linksys) and what is your experience?

Heya, I've used both version you recommended and others. I think by far Tomato is the best i've found for the WRT54g routers. It seems to run really quick compared to DDWRT and OpenWRT. It has almost all of the features that the bigger ones have but Tomato just seems to do it better. I'd for sure recommend it for anyone wanting to venture out and try this out.

Good luck!

I second tomato - its good stuff and frequently updated.

Thanks for your opinions. I haven't made the switch yet. For some reason, my problems with the router have now disappeared, though nothing else has changed since the last time I reset it. Since my wife and I work a lot from home, I don't have much of a downtime window so I've held off for now. It's something that I want to play around with though and will probably do it the next long weekend I have.