{"id":28,"date":"2013-04-02T22:52:17","date_gmt":"2013-04-03T06:52:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nramkumar.org\/tech\/?p=28"},"modified":"2013-11-28T12:59:26","modified_gmt":"2013-11-28T20:59:26","slug":"dd-wrt-on-the-buffalo-wzr-hp-g300nh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nramkumar.org\/tech\/blog\/2013\/04\/02\/dd-wrt-on-the-buffalo-wzr-hp-g300nh\/","title":{"rendered":"DD-WRT on the Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH &#8211; Jump in, the water is fine"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have had the Buffalo <a title=\"Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH\" href=\"http:\/\/www.newegg.com\/Product\/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833162031\" target=\"_blank\">WZR-HP-G300NH<\/a> (v1, A0A3 h\/w version) router for over 3 years now. At the time I bought it, my criteria for selecting a router were:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"line-height: 13px;\">It should support gigabit Ethernet (GigE)<\/span><\/li>\n<li>It should support 802.11N (draft at the time)<\/li>\n<li>It should be able to provide coverage throughout our home<\/li>\n<li>Price, Specs, Stability etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The first requirement surprisingly was the strongest filter of them all &#8211; 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 &#8211; the router almost had DD-WRT support at the time I was planning to buy it (although I didn&#8217;t think this was a must-have at the time &#8211; 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.<\/p>\n<p>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:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Every single change required a router reboot to take effect. That gets tired really fast.<\/li>\n<li>Bug where after running for a while (days, even weeks) the wired network and wireless network would be \u00a0totally 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.<\/li>\n<li>Internet speed dropping slowly over time &#8211; noticeable only over a long period of time.<\/li>\n<li>NAT loopback\/Reverse NAT doesn&#8217;t work. You can&#8217;t reach servers from inside the LAN using dyndns names or the WAN address.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>I flashed the official DD-WRT firmware from Buffalo found <a title=\"dd-wrt download\" href=\"http:\/\/www.buffalotech.com\/support-and-downloads\/download\/wzrhpg300nh-pro-v24sp2-19484-beta-download.zip\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>. Flashing is a no-brainer as this is an officially supported DD-WRT build &#8211; just go to the router&#8217;s administration page and flash the firmware. After flashing, here are the things that I have noticed:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"line-height: 13px;\">The firmware version is DD-WRT v24SP2-MULTI (07\/15\/12) std &#8211; build 19484\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<li>I have not had any issues with wifi so far &#8211; 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.<\/li>\n<li>My wireless network configuration is simple &#8211; router configured in AP mode, single SSID, NG mixed, Turbo and auto channel.<\/li>\n<li>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 &#8211; I followed the fix suggested <a title=\"NAT loopback fix\" href=\"http:\/\/svn.dd-wrt.com\/ticket\/1868\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>. You have to turn off &#8220;Filter WAN NAT redirection&#8221; under Security\/Firewall and save the following script to Administration\/Commands\/Firewall<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<pre id=\"firewall\" style=\"padding-left: 60px;\">LAN=`nvram get lan_ipaddr`\/`nvram get lan_netmask`\r\niptables -t nat -I POSTROUTING -o br0 -s $LAN -d $LAN -j MASQUERADE<\/pre>\n<ul>\n<li>To configure static DHCP (this is where you want to fix the IP addresses for certain devices on your network &#8211; for e.g. I want a fixed IP address for my Windows Home Server), you need to enable JFFS2.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve setup port forwarding for my internet visible services and servers and it works fine.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,13,12],"tags":[67,64,66,15,16,17,65],"class_list":["post-28","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-configuration","category-dd-wrt","category-wzr-hp-g300nh","tag-ath9k","tag-buffalo","tag-dd-wrt","tag-madwifi","tag-nat-loopback","tag-reverse-nat","tag-wzr-hp-g300nh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nramkumar.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nramkumar.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nramkumar.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nramkumar.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nramkumar.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/nramkumar.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":125,"href":"https:\/\/nramkumar.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions\/125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nramkumar.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nramkumar.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nramkumar.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}