I have had the Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH (v1, A0A3 h/w version) router for over 3 years now. At the time I bought it, my criteria for selecting a router were:
- It should support gigabit Ethernet (GigE)
- It should support 802.11N (draft at the time)
- It should be able to provide coverage throughout our home
- Price, Specs, Stability etc.
The first requirement surprisingly was the strongest filter of them all – there were precious few routers in the market at that time that supported GigE. Based on these criteria, the Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH stood out as a great candidate – the router almost had DD-WRT support at the time I was planning to buy it (although I didn’t think this was a must-have at the time – a stance that I have changed since then) and what was even better was that Buffalo had announced that the router will have an officially supported DD-WRT firmware released soon. The RAM, ROM and CPU specs on this router are outstanding, especially for the price. All things considered, this router sounded like a great deal.
For the most part, the router has worked out ok. I was using it with the stock firmware and things seemed to mostly work fine once I got rid of useless annoyances like AOSS etc. However, the stock firmware had several issues that bothered me:
- Every single change required a router reboot to take effect. That gets tired really fast.
- Bug where after running for a while (days, even weeks) the wired network and wireless network would be totally disconnected from each other. That is, wired LAN clients will not be able to reach any wireless client and vice-versa. What made this bug really maddening was that connectivity to the Internet itself was fine from both wired and wireless clients even when the router reached this state.
- Internet speed dropping slowly over time – noticeable only over a long period of time.
- NAT loopback/Reverse NAT doesn’t work. You can’t reach servers from inside the LAN using dyndns names or the WAN address.
Every time I ran into one of these issues I wanted to put DD-WRT on the router. However, searching the web gave decidedly mixed signals about the stability of DD-WRT on this router. A lot of folks were complaining about various issues but the one that bothered me the most and kept me away from trying DD-WRT were the reports that the wi-fi driver that DD-WRT used for this chipset (Atheros AR9132) was very unstable. Eventually, last weekend, I finally reached my breaking point with the issues in the stock firmware and decided to just flash DD-WRT and see how it worked.
I flashed the official DD-WRT firmware from Buffalo found here. Flashing is a no-brainer as this is an officially supported DD-WRT build – just go to the router’s administration page and flash the firmware. After flashing, here are the things that I have noticed:
- The firmware version is DD-WRT v24SP2-MULTI (07/15/12) std – build 19484
- This firmware uses the ath9k driver. This driver is based on official open-source drivers from Atheros themselves. The mad-wifi driver which was used in earlier versions of DD-WRT for this router had a bad reputation of being unstable.
- I have not had any issues with wifi so far – speed, coverage and connectivity have been stable and reliable. I should mention though that I have only been running DD-WRT on this router for about 3 days now.
- My wireless network configuration is simple – router configured in AP mode, single SSID, NG mixed, Turbo and auto channel.
- This version of DD-WRT has an issue with NAT loopback/Reverse Nat. This is where you have for e.g. a webserver on your network that is registered with dyndns and you attempt to reach it from within your LAN. I have a Windows Home Server on my network but trying to reach it with its dyndns name from within the LAN failed. This is easy to fix though – I followed the fix suggested here. You have to turn off “Filter WAN NAT redirection” under Security/Firewall and save the following script to Administration/Commands/Firewall
LAN=`nvram get lan_ipaddr`/`nvram get lan_netmask` iptables -t nat -I POSTROUTING -o br0 -s $LAN -d $LAN -j MASQUERADE
- To configure static DHCP (this is where you want to fix the IP addresses for certain devices on your network – for e.g. I want a fixed IP address for my Windows Home Server), you need to enable JFFS2.
- I’ve setup port forwarding for my internet visible services and servers and it works fine.
Overall, the official Buffalo DD-WRT has so far been fine on this router. I have enabled SSH and plan to turn on JFFS2, USB support and add a USB flash drive to experiment with some features once I have this setup running for a while.
Update after a bit of use? I have the same router and was considering flashing it DD-WRT, but I’m sorta novice on router configs. Just trying to figure out exactly what DD-WRT benefits truly are?
Running very stably for over 20 days now – no reboots, no wifi drop-offs or any other issues. For me the main benefits of DD-WRT are stability, fixes for the annoying issues I had with the Buffalo user-friendly firmware that I mentioned and the ability to tinker and add features (Asterisk PBX, RADIUS, QoS etc.). Another advantage is the ability to tweak antenna power settings to improve Wi-Fi coverage – I haven’t needed this.
Thanks, I was looking for exactly this kind of an update. I had last used ddwrt for this router almost 2 years ago and there were brutal wifi dropouts and router restarts, so I’m scouting a bit to see how the water is.
I also wanted to know how the community build is doing, in case you have updated to build 22118? (link ftp://ftp.dd-wrt.com/others/eko/BrainSlayer-V24-preSP2/2013/07-24-2013-r22118/buffalo_wzr-hp-g300nh/). Combing through the forums takes long for an Atheros device, with only old one-liners that may or may not still pertain to the latest build on my router model. The changelog says the latest is pre-configured for USB file sharing.
UPDATE- Answering my own question, the basic stuff works right out of the box with build 22118. No VLAN issue, no restarts, wifi dropouts; nor as much effort needed for USB file sharing and privoxy. (for other readers – certainly this isn’t the main reason to upgrade if you already have an older build configured to your requirements)
The “feature not a bug” bits seem to remain – Configuring the PPPoE client work, entering a ‘service name’ kills it (such as “ACT FTTB Broadband”).
Thanks for the update Madana Prathap. Does setting up a transparent proxy work on this build? How about the load factor and browsing performance when setting up a privoxy list based on fanboy adblock list? I’m in the middle of a few other projects and haven’t had the time to spend on tinkering with updating to a newer build yet.
I’m not looking at Privoxy yet, so no idea. 🙂
But the new check boxes for USB/Privoxy do still take you back to “specify path to script” before functioning.
Finally updated to 22118 – I’m not sure if you lucked out with USB automount (or maybe you’re using FAT32/NTFS which may not have the issue?), but if you use ext2 there’s a bug in this build that will drive you nuts. See my latest post for more details.
Hi Ram,
Sorry to come to this late but I had the same problem as you with this router and I also have WHS on a server on my Lan. I have been searching for quite a while for any answer in how to get my router to do loopback and be able to remote access the server from the local Lan. Thank goodness I found your blog. For some reason I cannot load the server so will have to do a re-install but was waiting to see if anyone had a way to get loopback to work, now I have your blog to follow. I shall flash the firmware on the router but in your blog you gave a link to the fix you found but the link failed. I have set up on the router two static ip addresses one for the server and one for my wireless laser printer. When I flash the router, will I have to re identify everything like the static ip addresses and the encryption codes I already have for my wireless devices?
Many Thanks for explaining your blog,
Regards,
David
David – I’ve updated the link so it should work now. If you’re flashing from the Buffalo user-friendly software to DD-WRT then yes, you’ll need to setup the static leases again and also the name and password for your wifi network. If you’re upgrading from one DD-WRT build to another, the settings will be retained unless you do a full reset (aka 30-30-30 reset).
Thanks Ram, Yep I will be flashing from the software that came with the router so will that firmware be the same as you are talking about? Which is the better way to flash, direct from software to buffalo website or download firmware to disk and install from there? I have no problem redoing the static ip’s and the rest, it is just nice to know what to expect before one flashes the firmware.
Will now recheck that link and print it off for reference.
Thanks a lot for your help,
David
Ram,
just a quick question. The file version 19484 from buffalo has a file extention of enc but that link to 22118 has a file extention of bin. Is there a big difference, is this going to be a problem?
Regards,
David
If you’re going from the original software on the router to DD-WRT, I would recommend you flash the Buffalo 19484 version first. This is probably the easiest and safest way to get the router to DD-WRT. Once you’re on that version of DD-WRT you can go to 22118 by using the link in my post above. If you’re going directly to 22118 from the Buffalo software, DO NOT use the link in my post.
Also, if loopback is the only issue for you, you can fix it without going to DD-WRT. You could overcome the loopback issue by setting up hosts file in your machines (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts in windows or /etc/hosts in Linux) where you can put the hostname and the NAT address of your homeserver (foo.homeserver.com 192.168.11.x) for e.g.
Good luck.
Just an update on locations of the files for this router (buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH),
I update file has been moved from the location referenced above.
After a google search for BrainSlayer-V24-preSP2 and WZR-HP-G300NH, I found several links to the files, including this link:
http://www.mmnt.net/db/0/0/dd-wrt.com/others/eko/BrainSlayer-V24-preSP2/2013/05-27-2013-r21676/buffalo_wzr-hp-g300nh
Hopefully this helps anyone else trying to upgrade. There are two different files there, depending on whether you are running the regular buffalo firmware,
or if you have already upgraded to DD-WRT (either the buffalo branded version, or any other version of dd-wrt).
Thanks again to BrainSlayer and everyone else for you work in creating and maintaining these fabulous builds!
-Phil
Thanks, Phil. Looks like the organization of downloads in dd-wrt has changed – you’ll need to go through ftp://ftp.dd-wrt.com/betas/ for getting the official versions. The version I’m running on this router now is available at ftp://ftp.dd-wrt.com/betas/2013/07-24-2013-r22118/buffalo_wzr-hp-g300nh/buffalo_to_ddwrt_webflash-MULTI.bin
Total novice but stuck with a WZR-HP-G300N which is running as a router on Buffalo version 1.79 but I am getting fed up with it losing connection with my VirginMedia Superhub. This problem can only be resolved by re-booting both units.
Can anyone advise whether changing to latest Brainslayer DD-WRT firmware will overcome this problem and if so are there any other issues.
Using the Buffalo inconjunction with Lap top, PC, TV, Blu Ray, NAS, android phones and a number of Squeezeboxes primarily for internet and streaming.