[KingViper]

So I've been following this thread and the progress of DD-WRT for the WNDR3700 for a while. I bought a few of them in a bundle for a good price and was going to disperse them throughout my house to implement a solid and fluid network. Like most people here, I was greeted with unfortunate network issues. (Losing connection, slow speeds, etc)

I had nearly talked myself into selling my units and buying a broadcom based non-dual band router that may have fewer features, but was more solid with 802.11N. As a last ditch effort, I decided to take a few peoples' advice and try OpenWRT. I had never used it before and was not too keen about it given the number of tutorials for setting it up and how almost all of them are based on the command line. Well, it's really not as bad as I thought. I found the following thread where someone has been keeping nightly builds configured specifically for the WNDR3700. The web interface is lacking compared to DDWRT and things are much different, but my wireless speeds are great! So far I haven't had any disconnects and everything network/internet related has been snappy and trouble free. Not only that, but an issue dealing with WAN lease renewals over port 68 that troubled me for over a week until I found the solution online with DDWRT was already fixed and built into OpenWRT.

Now, I'm not posting on here just to push OpenWRT and try to get people to jump ship or anything, but if you're like me and about to give up hope on the WNDR3700, this is worth a shot. I'm not going to make another post about OpenWRT and if you truly are interested I suggest you visit their forums. If DDWRT does eventually support this router better, I'm sure I'll be back..the interface is way too pretty and easy to use, but I can get by with this for now.

Good luck everyone!

https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=27722&p=1

[Pinqvin]

So I got the USB drive to mount (through the auto mount thing in the USB tab, still can't manually mount) but I'm having issues with opkg. Whenever I try doing a opkg update I get this error:

[tatsuya46]

Again since several missed it... how to get 26dBm TX power on ath0 with the WNDR3700, build must be 15962 or later:

[schnullimaus]

Somewhat sadly I have to second KingVipers tip.
After beeing an enthusiastic DD-WRT user on
Linksys /Broadcom I did switch to openwrt some
time ago (4 months or so) when I was looking
for a substitute of my old honoured WRT54.

I have tried different routers like EDIMAX (with a RALINK chip), TP-LINK 1043 and then the NetGear WNDR3700.
The Edimax didn't allow for multiple SSIDs under DD-WRT, which is likely due to the RALINK drivers, ok, not DD-WRT to blame. This router now works at my neighbor with stock firmware and he's very happy with it.

On the TP-LINK I (and some others in this Forum)
had some problems with the internal switch, loosing
connection TO the router while running traffic VIA
the router was fine. Not useful for me, as I do use the router as DNS Server, I always wanted to host a
WPAD.DAT file on it (with openwrt, I can, because
I have learned how to complile on my own, so I can add that 3 missing lines of code myself to tag it as X-NS-PROXY-AUTOCONFIG mime type) and some other stuff. When opening a bug for the switch issues
(which I had found reports and fixes about in the switch chip driver in the openwrt forums, so it was a known issue) and a bit complaining about DD-WRT is adding tons of new features (at that time, USB-NAS-related) instead of fixing the basics, I've got a reply which mad me a bit sad because they said the developpers can decide on their own what to do and I have to be patient. In fact it is very true, and I really respect and appriciate the work they are doing, and they have every right to set the priorities as they want. But that didn't help me, so I made the step over to openwrt. At that time the GUI was really behind, but hey, all the FUNCTIONS the access-point should deliver where there and DID WORK for me. So what, I am using the GUI once for set-up, and then I want to have a working box I'll never touch again (kind of . But there are some real advantages: everything CAN be configured on CLI, as it has a writable file system. ( i found it a drawback in DD-WRT that for instance for the dyndns configuration some defaults where built in by the developpers you could not work around). No problem in Openwrt, just go to the files and configure whatever you need.

To summarize, I think DD-WRT is a great OS for access-points with a highly optimized GUI for that,
and I like that idea. OpenWRT in contrast is more like "linux on embeddled systems which can also work
as an access-point", that adds complexity and that's what made me stick with DD-WRT to the point where it was a no-go because of the lack of very basic functionality. OpenWRT uses the newer ath9k-Driver for some time (and there is a lot of controversery (?) discussion on that, i have seen it getting better and better and can report that it works really fine for me (I am not using WDS or such stuff)

So, go ahead and give it a try, the recent GUI is really usable (even if one could like DD-WRTs still more). You'll definitively want a RECENT build,
not the BACKFIRE pebuild ones, as too mauch has
advanced since then (to me, it seems that also much more developpers are actively working on it, I did report some bugs and almost always it was fixed instantly...). It might require some more own
engagement, again reading through tutourials
(you did that when starting with DD-WRT, right?),
some pain as usual and all of that. But you're not the avarage user anyway when you're lurking around here and reading this...


Anothe tip from me: look to the client side. I did use a broadcom minipcie-card im my eeePC (dualboot WIN7 and MACOS), and it always worked "ok". I did install an atheros AR9280 card (they're dirt cheap
on ebay) and it works way better under both OSs:
higher and more stable wifi connections. On an other
laptop I put in a atheros 5008 card which also works better with my Netgear than the broadcom card i had in there earlier. Don't know if this is related to vendor interopability (broadcom <> atheros) or just the more recent chipsets are so much better.

I definitevely don't want to bash DD-WRT ore anyone.
If it is meeting you'r needs it's probably the best you can get. But if you feel you're really stuck at some point you might need to consider the alternatives (there is more out there) to move forward.

best regards,
Stephan

[yousaf465]

[randfee]

rofl... pretty much everyone here seems to have jumped ship and use OpenWRT... why even post here!?

[Jamby]

I use dd-wrt for my family's coffee shop. I prefer it to any other for feature set, and stability.

[rik]

failed upgrade from 15940 to 15962. goes about 10 seconds and fails. Tried Firefox browser, resetting the wndr3700 to default settings and retrying. No change. Cannot upgrade. thoughts?

using the NA link:
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Netgear_WNDR3700

[tatsuya46]

[rik]

[schnullimaus]

yousaf465,

I do not really have experience with openwrt's
QoS as I am not using it (I am using my
WNDR3700 as an access-Point only, the Internet
Connection is controlled by a dedicated Firewall).

I did not use dd-wrt's QoS also for the same reason.

From what I can tell, the QoS is based on the
linux tc tool which can be used on CLI to
query all the queues, classes, stats and so on.

I have recompiled my openwrt today and included the QoS, a screenshot of the settings page is attached.
(all settings shown are at default)

To be honest, if you need support for openwrt this might be the wrong place. As for the screenshot:
there is support for some layer-7 modules which try to detect p2p-Applications and so on. As most p2p
is encrypted nowadays some people consider it a waste of CPU attemtping to automatically detect and classify it.

I'll give it a try later and set up QoS for a policy
which gives high priority to SIP and RTP over all
other traffic, because that's an application that
applies to me (using a SIP client via WLAN on the iPhone)

best regards,
Stephan

[yousaf465]

[Jonny_doe]

I did try openwrt , but couldn't get to grips with the layout , i ended up installing dd-wrt again , but the wireless signals low , alot lower ...
Shame because i hate the netgear stock firmware , it lacks loads of options ...
I'd even buy dd-wrt if it would run good ...

[schnullimaus]

my quick tries with openwrt's QoS made things worse.
Without QoS enabled: Can have a good quality phone call while other PC surfes the net (via a proxy, so all the web page gets deliverd at once over the wlan- high peak load)
With QoS enabled on both the LAN and the WLAN ports:
Web activity causes poor voice quality - not exactly
what you'd expect .....likely because of misconfiguration - also i've seen drops of web traffic.

There is some default configuration active which does not show up in the gui. Some default policies can be found in openwrt's CLI - that's exactly what i dislike always, if the gui only gives you a subset of visibility.

So - more research and testing nessesary, though I know for sure that the underlying tools (iptables, tc) are powerful. I used them in another project very successfully.

Maybe if you need QoS then dd-wrt is the better bet,
i cannot really tell. I did not switch over to openwrt because of features, but because FOR ME some basic features were not working at THAT time - this might have changed in the meantime. Again, FOR ME, openwrt gives me exactly what i need, so I am lucky right now - your milage may vary.

From my point of view i am not in the first place interested in running the one or the other firmware, but i want to have my individual set of functions working correctly, so there is no bad or good, maybe there is a "it fits" or "it does not fit".

Best regards,
Stephan

[tatsuya46]

DD-WRT QoS is also a mess, anyday now its going to just stop working altogether. Over the last year I seen 1 QoS commit to trac, and after it it got worse. The more noise is made with this ticket the better chance we have... QoS affects EVERY router with EVERY build type.

http://svn.dd-wrt.com:8000/dd-wrt/ticket/1896