{"id":7450,"date":"2010-05-29T17:19:54","date_gmt":"2010-05-29T17:19:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8105\/?p=7450"},"modified":"2021-12-05T19:25:11","modified_gmt":"2021-12-05T19:25:11","slug":"new-toy-buffalo-whr-hp-g300n-wireless-n-router","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.shahada.abubakar.net\/?p=7450","title":{"rendered":"New Toy: Buffalo WHR-HP-G300N Wireless-N Router"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m not sure what Sunway put into the walls in our house, but I have had to put two wifi routers to get full coverage for the entire house. I have a wireless-G in my living room which reaches the front half of the house, and a really old wireless-B router in my study room, that handles the Streamyx connection and provides wifi coverage for the rear half of the house.<\/p>\n

The wireless-B unit is a really old Prolink unit, and some of my gadgets have problems connecting to it. I stuck with it as it is one of the few routers I had that allowed mapping an external port to a different internal port number.<\/p>\n

What with the Nexus One supposedly gaining wireless-N capability soon, I figured it was time to look into a wireless-N router. Wireless-N supposedly had better range than the earlier types, so it might solve my need for dual-wifi access points also.<\/p>\n

After some research, I settled on the Buffalo WHR-HP-G300N:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

After finding it in a pricelist online, I headed down to the shop in Lowyat plaza, only to find that it was out of stock. Eventually, I found it in a quiet pokey shop towards the back of the mall (ATE Advanced Techonology, Lot 2-07, 2nd Floor, Plaza Lowyat. +60(3)2144-7813). It was selling for RM199.<\/p>\n

There was another model without the “HP” going for RM139, but HP stands for high power, supposedly it has the radio in it is stronger and can reach further.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Unpacking it, here’s what’s in the box:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I set it up, and connected it to my network switch and streamyx modem. What followed was an hour of digging up files and repeatedly whacking at http:\/\/tmbill.tm.net.my to try and guess my streamyx password, last seen 5 years ago! I usually make it a a policy to write the streamyx login details below all the routers I set up, but this being a really old one, probably never got done.<\/p>\n

Once I got the password, the streamyx connection came up, and Internet was back. Not for long however …<\/p>\n

… as one of the reasons for buying this particular model of router is that you can reflash it with an open-source firmware that adds a lot more features to it. Which is exactly what I did. I started by going to the DD-WRT (http:\/\/www.dd-wrt.com) and clicking on router database, and entered the model of my router.<\/p>\n

You then get to download two firmware files, the first is used to replace the buffalo firmware with an earlier version of dd-wrt, and the second upgrades it to the current stable release of dd-wrt.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Note: The site strongly recommend doing a 30-30-30 reset (read this<\/a> thread) before and after flashing any firmware files.<\/p>\n

Upon flashing, the red light came on the router:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And shortly thereafter, my new router was running dd-wrt:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There are a lot of neat, advanced features in DD-WRT, so if you love tweaking things this is definitely for you. The first thing I did was setup my DHCP IP addresses for my regular equipment.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

You can also set it up to allow you to ssh into the router and play around with things:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There is a dyndns.org client in the router itself, which can replace the dyndns client software I have running on my PVR PC.<\/p>\n

The router keeps track of your daily bandwidth usage:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There are quite a few different “builds” of dd-wrt, the default one available for the buffalo WHR-HP-G300N is the Standard edition. Unfortunately, one of the features I was looking for, OpenVPN support, is not present in the Standard Edtion. However, Buffalo themselves are working with the author of dd-wrt to make this firmware standard on the WHR-HP-G300N, and once this “official” version is released, it is expected to contain OpenVPN support.<\/p>\n

And the coverage? Well, I managed to stay on wifi while walking around the house with my Nexus One. I might just keep the second wifi on for fun though, as it’s also being used as a network switch downstairs.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

This post was originally published as a Facebook Note at 2010-05-30 01:19:54 +0800.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m not sure what Sunway put into the walls in our house, but I have had to put two wifi routers to get full coverage for the entire house. I have a wireless-G in...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7759,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[109,117],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gadgets","category-internet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shahada.abubakar.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shahada.abubakar.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shahada.abubakar.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shahada.abubakar.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shahada.abubakar.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7450"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shahada.abubakar.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8115,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shahada.abubakar.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7450\/revisions\/8115"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shahada.abubakar.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shahada.abubakar.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shahada.abubakar.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shahada.abubakar.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}