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Netgear Launches Open Source-Friendly Wireless Router
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Jun 28, 2008 07:10 PM
from the market-linksys-chose-to-mostly-ignore dept.
from the market-linksys-chose-to-mostly-ignore dept.
An anonymous reader submits news of Netgear's release of the "open source Wireless-G Router (model WGR614L), enabling Linux developers and enthusiasts to create firmware for specialized applications, and supported by a dedicated open source community. The router supports the most popular open source firmware; Tomato and DD-WRT are available on WGR614L, making it easier for users to develop a wide variety of applications. The router is targeted at people who want custom firmware on their router without worrying about issues, and enjoy the benefits of having an open source wireless router."
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Submission: NETGEAR Launches Open Source Wireless-G Router by Anonymous Coward
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What's the point of a new wireless-G one? (Score:5, Interesting)
Here in 2008, I'm only interested in Free Software-friendly 802.11 N routers. Anybody know of any?
Re:What's the point of a new wireless-G one? (Score:5, Insightful)
I would rather wait till they finalize the spec.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I bet they include 801.11n support in the HURD.
Re:What's the point of a new wireless-G one? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:What's the point of a new wireless-G one? (Score:4, Funny)
The problem is how to use the same "free" radio frequency (2.4 GHz) both for "b/g" and "n" without interferencing
* SLAP *
Don't do that.
Parent
Re:What's the point of a new wireless-G one? (Score:5, Funny)
Let him say what he wants.
Stop interferencing.
Parent
Re:What's the point of a new wireless-G one? (Score:5, Insightful)
802.11n operates on 5Ghz as well.
It's time to start ditching backward compatibility. Every refresh of the 802.11 spec does not have to have backward compatibility. Backward compatibility here just serves to increase the distance between theoretical maximums and actual observed speeds.
I run a dual-router setup on my home network. I've got a Linksys WRT54Gv4 running Tomato alongside an Apple Airport Extreme. The WRT fills the job of router as well as 802.11g (802.11b is turned off) access point, while the AEBN is configured to work as an 802.11n wireless bridge on the 5Ghz band. Actual throughput is far faster on this setup than on a single device serving everything.
I know there are practical reasons for backward compatibility, but we need to get off our love affair with it. Keep it in enterprise hardware, but for consumers, make a clean break. There's no reason why we can't have an abundance of cheap 802.11b/g devices and a separate class of devices for 802.11n. There's no reason one can't run both if one needs both. The convenience offered by a single package just makes it worse for everyone in the long run.
Parent
Re:What's the point of a new wireless-G one? (Score:4, Interesting)
Keep it in enterprise hardware, but for consumers, make a clean break.
You're kind of missing the point. The claim was that the need for backwards compatibility was part of what was making it so difficult to finalize the standard. If you keep it in enterprise hardware then the problem is still there! You could have two standards, I suppose, one "consumer" standard that makes a clean break and one "enterprise" standard that's backwards compatible, but that kind of defeats the whole purpose of having a standard in the first place.
Personally, my house has a lot of g-only devices, and I'm glad that I can serve everything off a single router.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Honest question here....is there any problem with linux
Re:What's the point of a new wireless-G one? (Score:4, Interesting)
802.11n operates on 5Ghz as well.
It's time to start ditching backward compatibility. Every refresh of the 802.11 spec does not have to have backward compatibility.
I provide the WiFi in hotels. I generally put between 10 and 15 APs in, and guess what I will use if that is the case? The old standard most guests have. Hell, some hotels still have 802.11b in them. Slightly better range than G, and still faster than the pipe they have. So if you loose backwards compatibility, I hope you don't want to use any hotspots.
Parent
Re:What's the point of a new wireless-G one? (Score:5, Funny)
I provide the WiFi in hotels.
Oh, YOU'RE the guy.
Don't let me find you.
Parent
Re:What's the point of a new wireless-G one? (Score:5, Funny)
Cromulence abounds.
Parent
Re:What's the point of a new wireless-G one? (Score:4, Funny)
Well, that was a very fuckusanct thing to say wasn't it...
Parent
Re:What's the point of a new wireless-G one? (Score:4, Funny)
Perhaps, but it's at (+4, Simpsons Reference) right now.
Man: "Well I believe I'll mod that down."
Kang: "Go ahead. Throw your vote away."
Parent
Later, Lead Coder Baldric Goes to Sir B. (Score:3, Funny)
Sir Bedevere: Can we use XML?
Baldric: I have a cunning plan. We will use UTF-8, and have our system include SÃturday, instead of Saturday, so that there won't be any ASCII 97 characters except in the penultimate position.
Sir Bedevere: Recall, Baldric, that I hired you away from Edmu
Problems... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Problems... (Score:4, Funny)
It always seems that whenever a company releases something open-source they have to make at least one component proprietary. As this allows Open-WRT to be installed on it perhaps it is really open, but just about every device that uses something open-source has something that makes it hard to install something new on it or they don't use a 100% open source OS (examples, N800, EEE PC, TiVo, etc)
EEE PC? You mean this EEE PC running Ubuntu right here? It can't do that? Hmmm... Well I better stop altering reality then...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Losing Marketshare to Linksys (Score:5, Interesting)
So they finally decided to stop handing the Linux tweakable router market to Linksys/Cisco, huh? Let's see, how long did that take?
According to Wikipedia, Linksys cut hardware back on their routers and released the hackable WRT54GL in 2005. So they've done nothing but ignore this market for nearly 4 years.
Took someone else long enough.
Older hardware is cheaper, its on the shelf (Score:5, Interesting)
Netgear doesn't make money on firmware. They make money selling routers. So if this sells more routers, then fine. But don't look to them to start cannibalizing their sales of Super-G, MiMo or N routers to sell more older on the shelf gear. 614 routers are themselves, fairly old probably as old internally as Linksys open routers. All they did was tweak the gear slightly in light of cheaper hardware now vs 3 years ago.
BTW, I LOVED my 624v3 Super-G Netgear router, for the 12 months it lasted. Then last month the wireless piece of it conked out. I replaced it with an 824v2 with all internal diversity antennas so the fact that Netgear cheaped out and never built replaceable antenna couplings is moot.
Parent
Re:Older hardware is cheaper, its on the shelf (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah but with routers it's a straight trade off between RAM and ROM size and manufacturing cost. I bet Netgear and Linksys have or had warehouses full of these older G routers or, they had very long job contracts with Solectron and similar spec manufacturing companies. They have to use the inventory or the production runs and it's probably cheaper to tweak the hardware a little bit to accommodate Tomato etc than it is to write off the bulk of it. And, if all goes well they instill a little goodwill with the hobby community and get a peak into some of the requested features they don' deliver.
Hell, if they play their cards right, commodity routers could all be sold w/o any firmware at all and Netgear and Linksys could save dollars (or Yuan) not having to develop it or support it all. I've often wondered why they would even bother creating v1, v2, v3 and so on of what is essentially the same hardware with the same features and performance if they didn't have to worry about hardware requirements versioning.
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Re:Losing Marketshare to Linksys (Score:5, Informative)
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I think they already tried this once... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I think they already tried this once... (Score:5, Funny)
My dad has a Netgear that looks like that; it constantly overheats and completely drops wifi connections (ethernet works fine).
Ventilating it and adding some aluminum fins onto the main chip helped only somewhat.
I wonder, is this new one any better?
Parent
Re:I think they already tried this once... (Score:4, Informative)
I had trouble with my Netgear wireless router... It would work fine for a few days then would stop accepting new connections.
I upgraded to the latest firmware and haven't had any trouble since...
If you haven't already tried, it's probably worth a shot!
Parent
Buffalo anyone? (Score:4, Informative)
My Buffalo runs BSD (Score:5, Informative)
I bought a Buffalo wifi router a couple years ago, when Worst Buy has them on clearance for $39. It runs stock firmware, which identifies itself as BSD based. The thing works flawlessly. I wish I had a couple more of them.
Parent
Drop out? (Score:3, Funny)
Currently the wife's XP laptop will never drop off the wireless. If my Linux laptop is connect they will both drop about once a day. If I turn on my linux desktop which is wired in, the wireless laptops will drop out about once an hour.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
N.B.: I'm not a networking guy either. (My nerd credentials fall in fire-fighting.) I hope that hardware helps though. It invariably does for me.
Tomato and DD-WRT is not open nor free;use openWRT (Score:5, Informative)
Tomato is not really open source. It is open source except for the UI.
DD-WRT is just a branch of OpenWRT that costs money. It is free for home use however.
Use OpenWRt; It is open and free. If you want simplicity, use X-wrt, which is basically OpenWRT with a web based UI. It does not use the latest version of OpenWRT, but is very stable. It includes a smörgåsbord of modules to add with a simple mouse click.
That's OK, this device isn't open either... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's also not new, so it's not clear why this is on
Parent
Re:Tomato and DD-WRT is not open nor free;use open (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Netgear is correcting their screwup (Score:5, Informative)
This page:
WGR614L really a WG614v9? [myopenrouter.com]
talks about it.
I removed his contact numbers and email address. They're on the page I linked to, and he really doesn't need a slashdot post of his vitals, he's got enough problems right now.
Nice to see Netgear's on the ball.
Apparently Netgear's guy responsible is personally taking care of the problem.
hanzie
Re:Netgear is correcting their screwup (Score:5, Informative)
My email address is som.choudhury@netgear.com. Please do send me your address.
Regards
-Som Pal Choudhury
Senior Product Line Manager, Advanced Wireless
NETGEAR Inc.
Off: 408-367-7884
Cell: 408-910-2936
Parent
Netgear rep contact info (Score:4, Informative)
The below contact info was posted by an AC whom I believe to be the Netgear gentleman in question.
Here it is again (because lots of folks will never see an AC post)
Mr. Choudhury, I recommend registering for an account here and posting. If you don't, someone else will.
Thank you very much for proactively working to fix the problem. It gives me confidence that your company's equipment might be worth trying.
hanzie.
Parent
Dupe! Was previously posted as WRT54GL! ;-p (Score:3, Insightful)
The specs on this thing is suspiciously similar to the good old WRT54GL. Unless the price is lower, I really don't see what this thing brings to the table.
If it had just included a couple USB ports and upped the ram/flash a little bit, it would have improved the hackability considerably. Look at what people have been able to do with the NSLU2 [nslu2-linux.org]. With these fairly minor changes the WGR614L could supersede both the 54GL and NSLU2.
About time... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they're just acknowledging that they can't write firmware to save their lives. I had a WG602 that would always lock up after a few days of use; the lockups would happen sooner after big ftp/scp sessions. Basically the damn thing had a memory leak. Updating to the latest firmware didn't help; I finally replaced it with a Linksys.
(Oh yeah, and they also promised upgradability to 802.1x WPA when I bought it, and never released a firmware update with WPA support.) AFA I'm concerned, this is the smartest decision they could possibly make. Now they don't have to bother with fake promises of future firmware upgrades, they can just leave it to their customers to upgrade at will. And people buying these routers won't have to put up with buggy firmware without any recourse.
Of course I still think it's too late; I've completely sworn off ever buying Netgear again and have stuck to Linksys...
Nice! (Score:3, Interesting)
Cheers, Ed
Re:no USB? (Score:4, Insightful)
and no gigabit ethernet? wake me up when I can get a netgear adsl wireless n+ router with fricking gigabit ethernet!
open source or not I'd buy it :(
Parent
Re:no USB? (Score:5, Funny)
And no monitor included? No printer function either?
I'm not going to buy this piece of shit.
Parent
Re:no USB? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is this some kind of joke? What the hell do you need USB for? The only thing a wireless access point and router needs is 1) an input ethernet port, for connecting to your cable/DSL modem, 2) 4 output ethernet ports, for connecting to your wired machines (including printer), and 3) antennae for your wireless devices.
I do tend to agree with the other reply to this; any newer router needs gigabit ports on the output. It's pretty annoying that all my machines have GbE, but can only talk to each other at 100 Mb/s because of the router they're connected through (which admittedly is an older model). If Netgear or someone else released an open-source-friendly wireless router with 802.1n and GbE ports for the internal network, that would probably be attractive enough to me to decide to upgrade from my current D-Link. As it is, just being open-source-friendly isn't quite enough to get me to upgrade; as long as my current router works, I don't have much to complain about. Unfortunately, my D-Link barely works right: I'm unable to upgrade the firmware to the newer versions, because then it won't allow wirelessly-connected devices to access my JetDirect-connected HP printer. I've emailed D-Link about it and they don't care.
Parent
Re:no USB? (Score:5, Insightful)
What the hell do you need USB for?
If it had 802.11n and a 4-port GigE switch I wouldn't complain, but the current hardware spec on this thing makes it just a clone of the good old wrt54gl. It is really nothing new or exciting at all, just a clone of a Linksys product.
Now, with some USB ports you can do all sorts of additional stuff. External harddisks. Printers. Scanners. NAS for your home network. uPnP media server. Network printer/scanner server. Look up all the things people have been using NSLU2s for and then imagine a device that has the capabilities of both the 54GL and the NSLU2.
Parent
Re:no USB? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't personally, but some people use the USB port on their router to connect a PC to it, so they've been coming that way for years.
I think a more useful feature on this model would be to use a USB port to connect an external USB storage enclosure and turn it into a NAS as a bonus. With a Linux OS, that'd be pretty easy to configure.
Parent
Re:no USB? (Score:4, Insightful)
Easy enough to configure, but sure to max-out the low-speed CPU in the router instantly.
Packetizing data at full 100Mbps uses serious CPU time, which this box doesn't have. And if you want any kind of security for the data, like SFTP accesses, just forget the whole thing.
If you want a SAN, grab an old computer. Don't try to force a router into a file server role.
Parent
Re:no USB? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:no USB? (Score:4, Informative)
For just a moment, don't think of it as a router. Think of it as a low-power-consumption custom Linux server with a certain amount of RAM and a certain amount of flash storage. Now think about other options for such a device -- perhaps as a SAMBA file server or a CUPS print server. I'd even like to see it with an audio output so I could hook it to a stereo ala Apple's Aiport Express -- I'm sure someone would soon have a pretty good UPnP media server software project well underway -- but if they don't want to build audio in USB would at least leave it open as an option.
Apple's got several successful products (Time Capsule & Airport Express) that exist in the "wireless access point plus more" realm. A moderately-priced decent-build-quality piece of hardware with fair extension capabilities via open-source firmware has some pretty fascinating potential.
Parent
Re:no USB? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually there is instructions on their website on how to solder a USB cable to the router. This is shown for recovery purposes.
http://www.myopenrouter.com/article/10341/Recover-Your-WGR614L-Using-a-Serial-Console-Windows/ [myopenrouter.com]
Probably not exactly what you want but, its nice there is already instructions (in case) you brick it.
Parent
Re:no USB? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Too little memory! No USB ports! (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem I have with my WRT54G hardware version 4 is the lack of storage space. It has 4MB of flash memory for the system files as well as for storing my photos and webpages.
I can see how this can be a problem. Not to mention that it probably won't be enough to run Duke Nukem Forever when it comes out.
Oh, wait, it's a router, not a NAS or a terminal server !
Parent