We have used Sveasoft’s public release of their “Alchemy” router firmware for the past couple of years. It has been very stable and I’ve not really found any reason to change it, despite much of the controversy surrounding Sveasoft’s somewhat shady business practices. This weekend, I got an update that the more recent “Talisman” version finally had a public version1. I decided I could stand to download it and give it a try.
Big mistake. What is it your supposed to do with something that isn’t broken? That’s right: Don’t try to fix it.
After hours of struggling with not being able to get network traffic routed back out to the internet and secure my wireless network, I gave up. I downloaded the latest stable build of DD-WRT, based on the recommendation of Lifehacker (among many others). I have the “mini” version installed and I’m pretty happy with it thus far. I may eventually upgrade to the full version, but I suspect I’ll end up with a newer router long before that happens.
Oh, one unfortunate side note regarding DD-WRT: it appears that it’s web interface is simply incompatible with FireFox. This befuddled me for some time but as soon as I started using Safari to manage the router, everything worked smoothly.
Now, to figure out our VOIP router… which will likely end in us dumping Vonage (pretty much like everyone of their other customers).
- What? Public? Free? You can read all about the Sveasoft/ DD-WRT/ Linksys firmware struggles elsewhere. Just know that I’m not paying anyone for a router firmware because they force me to. I’ll gladly tip people for their hardwork, but not because they think they can build a business model off of selling GNU licensed software. [↩]
