VPN issues with the Linksys WRT54G
From time to time I have a need to vpn into our Clarity internal network, mostly when I'm upgrading something to do with the blog server or occasionally doing some work from home. I recently upgraded to a new Apple MacBook Pro running Vista, which rocks for the most part. Last week I tried to connect to VPN as usual and no go. Would try to authenticate and fail. Every now and then it would connect briefly and then drop off. So naturally I assumed I had something misconfigured on my laptop and went through the usual litany of troubleshooting (dropping and recreating the connection, applying patches, etc.). No joy.
So over the weekend I had some more time to research the problem and I really wanted to get on the network to install some updates to the blog server. After the usual Google rabbit trail of trying variations on searches for the error I was getting (629 for those keeping score at home), Vista VPN, etc, etc I started to notice my router name was popping up occasionally in the searches. So taking a different tack, I remembered my router was a fairly recent acquisition and maybe I hadn't really tried to VPN since setting it up. Searching on VPN and Linksys WRT54G brought back an onslaught of customer complaints, blog posts, forum posts and various and sundry attempts to get this router working with a standard Windows XP or Vista VPN. To make matters more confusing, Linksys has issued at least 7 versions of this router and I have Version 6. This is a very popular router and one of the de facto choices for wireless G at home, even among techies.
Because Linksys has been rather poor in actually designing firmware that works well, a cottage industry has sprung up around 3rd party firmwares for this router. It's just a modded Linux distro, so obviously the hacker community didn't have too much trouble coming up with something that worked. In additional to working, all kinds of new functionality was able to be included which turned this $75 router into something more like the $3000 routers Cisco, Linksys's parent company, makes bank on. Needless to say, Cisco was not amused and effectively tried to cripple this router starting with Version 5 by limiting the flash RAM to something very small (I think 2 Meg). You can still get very workable 3rd party distros, but you have to be careful to get the right one because if you overrun your firmware space, you might end up with a nice doorstop instead of a router. Actually, a crappy doorstop since these things don't weigh much.
Linksys for some reason can't see to get VPN working in these routers and apparently this problem has existed for at least a year and a half and through several firmware upgrades. So rather than wait for them to fix the problem, I decided to take the risk and plunge and put a 3rd party firmware on mine. I won't go into all the nitty gritty details of it, but I basically followed these instructions, using the DD-WRT distro. Didn't really run into any issues and had the router back up in less than 10 minutes. VPN connected flawlessly and almost instantly the first time I tried. In addition (and this is just anecdotal), the connection seems to have better throughput than before. I still have all the features that the Linksys firmware had and a bunch of extra stuff, which I may or may not use. I haven't lived with this for more than a couple days, so maybe I will run into some things and I'm still not sure what the uptime will be (I was having to reset my Linksys quite regularly). But I'm pretty happy I took the chance at this point.