Many of you will remember my post detailing on how much I loved my router after doing the Tomato firmware injection for my aging Buffalo router. Today was a charity challenge that I took upon myself. Sol was back in town and we were due to hang out together with regards to family… so I would spend some time with family and him. When we arrived back at his home residence, I wanted to check out his router and see if it was a possible candidate for the Tomato Router upgrade.  To my dismay… He had a Version 6 of the WRT54G router.

I was in dismay, but I remembered that the folks at DD-WRT had their own custom firmware of their own. Much like my Buffalo router, the WRT54G v6 router does not want to play nice with custom firmwares unlike any of its siblings from v1-v4. The DD-WRT community is rather good with resources, so they have this helpful link from Bitsum on how to inject the firmware into the router. To sum up the steps:

1. You have to download the VX Works “Prep”, VX Works “Killer”, and DD-WRT Micro firmware
2. Throw the VX Works Prep to put the router into “Management” mode via a firmware update and let it proceed
3. After the router is in “Management Mode”, upload the VX Works Killer firmware and let that do it’s thing.
4. Inject the DD-WRT Micro (Generic) Firmware via a TFTP command (Windows folks, use this: ftp://ftp.linksys.com/pub/network/tftp.exe if command line scares you)
5. When the injection completes, congrats you have a  poor man’s equivalent of a $600 Cisco grade router.

After I did the injection… Sol noticed a slight increase of his internet speed. Obviously, the next step was to hook him up with OpenDNS to protect him and my auntie from phishing sites and other malicious attack sites as well as speed up the backbone of his connection. The procedure only took 5 minutes over all and once again was totally worth the effort. My hack attack urge was satisfied and the best part… I got to make Sol’s return a fun one. Hopefully his online gaming addictions or even YouTube addictions much easier to palate for his connection.

For those about to do the jump to inject DD-WRT to their compatible routers… Just take a note from me when I did the Tomato router hack about the MAC addresses. Take down the MAC addresses for your router and keep them on hand, the DD-WRT hack does change your MAC addresses so you will have to “clone” them to restore them back to the original ones so you don’t have to fool with calling your broadband provider to have them release your “old” router’s address.