I posted a while back a teardown of the VM Superhub 2 router, as VM has “upgraded” to a rebranded Arris TG2492S/CE CM. Alas Virgin Media in their wisdom have decided that simple router features like being able to change the LAN subnet & DHCP server range are far too complex to trust to the Great Unwashed, so they’ve removed them entirely from the firmware, and locked the local LAN onto the 192.168.0.0/24 range.
As my network is already numbered in the 10.0.0.0/16 range, with several statically addressed devices present and other systems relying on these static assignments, using this router would have meant renumbering everything.
Luckily Virgin had the decency to leave the “modem mode” option in the firmware, effectively disabling the WiFi & routing functions & allowing the connection of a third-party router. Some searching for a suitable replacement for the core of my network turned up the Linksys WRT1900ACS. While I waited for this to arrive, some temporary workarounds were needed to make everything function well enough with VM’s crap router.
These routers have been designed as a modern replacement for the venerable WRT54G series of routers from some time ago, with full support for OpenWRT/DD-WRT firmware, and with a beefy 1.6GHz dual core CPU & 512MB of RAM I doubt I’ll be able to knock this one over with too much network traffic! This was pretty much the most powerful router I could afford, and should mean I don’t need to upgrade for a long time. (No teardown of this yet, as it’s taking care of the network at present. Maybe some point in the future I’ll take the plunge).
The stock firmware isn’t totally awful, and has some nice features, but I decided it needed to be replaced with DD-WRT for more security & future flexibility. I’ll leave the firmware flashing stuff for another post 😉
