January 11, 2006

Running someone else's firmware on your Linksys Router?

In case you didn't know you can run firmware developers by folk's other than Linksys on a Linksys router. Why? The best answer to this question is that these other developers are adding features that Linksys just doesn't have in their firmware. Like what? Most often it's support for advanced crypto (AES cypher) or routing (protocols other than RIP). Here's a link to an article by Eric at Roachfiend that goes into more detail about why.

Who should be thinking about this? From what I've seen this is something that just a handful of Linksys users might even consider and still fewer should do. If the feature that you want isn't in a Linksys router it is probably because it doesn't belong there. Case in point AES. Using AES to encrypt data over the wire is great and much more secure than DES or 3DES. The problem is that it's computationally harder and therefore to be done quickly you need a bigger, faster processor. My message is that if you want AES or advanced routing; buy a real router.

If you are still interested in doing this; more power to you. Experiment with it. My suggestion would be to make sure that you have another router of some sort to fall back on if the Linksys becomes wedged (i.e. the lights are on but it stops working) and can't be reset right away.

To learn more about the firmware choices that are out there see this article over on Linksysinfo.org.

January 02, 2006

Top 10 ways to protect DNS

Something that I think everyone using the Internet should be concerned about is protecting the Domain Name System or DNS. Without DNS this blog, Google, all my other work, and everything else would be a series of IP addresses in dotted decimal notation.

While I'm not usually a fan of thinking found on Tech Republic (I have a link to a link sometimes to yet another link to some content problem) they do justice to this topic in this article.

Here is a link to the original article where I found this over at ZDNet: Top 10 ways to protect DNS | ZDNet Government Blog | ZDNet.com.