I have put together some previous articles on upgrading the firmware on your Linksys WRT600N wireless router using various versions of DD-WRT. One thing I have not included in the articles is the specific DD-WRT download location for the firmware branch that I prefer which is called BrainSlayer. So below is a brief explanation of DD-WRT FTP structure where the WRT600N firmware is located.
I have configured a Linksys WRT600N to connect using PPTP to my company’s VPN server in the past as noted in this previous article. I have since swapped out the Linksys WRT600N with a Linksys WRT54GS because I wanted to replace the antennas with larger antennas to work on getting better wireless coverage in my workshop in the basement and with the primary wireless router being located on the second floor of my house I needed to do numerous things to squeeze as much signal as possible. I also noticed numerous other issues with the WRT600N including the router locking up on a regular basis as well as dropping connections.
A company I work for has a VPN connection at the office and from time to time I need to pull firmware, software, or various documents from them. Other times there are a couple Linux servers on the local network that I need to work on so I can either SSH from the outside or create a VPN connection and hit the devices through the local network. The amount of data I am pulling from the local network has become more frequent so I needed to find a way to not have to create a VPN connection from my laptop so often and was thinking that it would probably just be easier to connect my Linksys WRT600N router running dd-wrt firmware to the office VPN server. This way I would always have a connection to the office without having to interrupt work and create a PPTP VPN connection.
If you are having trouble communicating between the wired and wireless networks after installing or upgrading your Linksys WRT600N wireless router with dd-wrt firmware then the issue is likely related to the VLAN configuration. After you flash the firmware on a Linksys WRT600N you will have the default dd-wrt settings. One of these settings includes separating the wired and wireless traffic because this is the correct way to secure things because the wireless network is much more likely to be breached than the wired network. Switching this setting to allow communication between wired and wireless devices is easy by following the directions below.
I have been running dd-wrt firmware on my Linksys wrt600n for awhile now however I have always had some issues. I had finally had the configuration to where the issues were minimal however it has never been perfect. I decided since it had been a couple months it was time to try a newer build from the site. I upgraded and things got a lot worse in terms of wireless on the 2.4 GHz channel so I did a ton of troubleshooting and read a lot of posts semi related to my problems with the 600N on the dd-wrt forum. During the reading I learned a lot about the proper way to flash the firmware and I wanted to share my findings here.
First off when you upgrade the firmware you are supposed to do a hard reset before the firmware upgrade and after the firmware upgrade. A hard reset should be done following the below directions.
**NOTE** Hold the reset button in during this entire process