Openwrt Woes

My router was giving me problems for the last month. I have a wrt54gs version 2 and it was working pretty well with openwrt 7.09 but the internet connection kept failing. Most often when the phone rings which I believe the wireless is buggy so not only does it cause my internet connection to reconnect it completely disables my wireless. Really nasty.

I was too lazy to go through the openwrt update to openwrt 8.09 because the webif interface would not accept the firmware. It did however accept dd-wrt. I find it works pretty well in the last 2 weeks. However it seems all these firmwares becomes progressively bad over the weeks particular with internet connection reliability and wireless. I hope to go back to openwrt because I am use to editing files when I connect through ftp, telnet, or ssh. DD-WRT is uneditable unless you setup jffs and it just seems a little weird even though it has a much friendly interface than the webif implementation in openwrt.

The only funny thing with dd-wrt is the dnsmasq and dhcp server implementation. There's no point to have both running when dnsmasq does both. However somewhere in the firmware it automatically grabs a resolve file which are the dns servers. Any good expert in internet connectivity will tell you that dns server is the most important because alot of isp dns servers are either bad(slow requests or failed requests) or to make some money divert your dns requests through their search engines (verizon dsl does this) or worst. After much time which was unusually long the resolve.dnsmasq file gets their servers from the web interface even if you disable it in the basic setup. Basically I had to enable dhcp server in basic setup and add my 2 static dns servers. Save it and than disable the dhcp server. Weird right?

However I realize reliability is the most important issue... If dd-wrt gives me weird problems I will migrate to tomato firmware and do with less flexibility.