The Jesus-firmware for your ADSL modem

Well, not quite, but close enough. If you happen to have a Netgear DG834XX ADSL modem router, I strongly suggest that you have a look at the DGTeam custom firmware:

All the features are listed after the break, but to wet your RSS-appetite, you should get excited about wake-on-LAN, TCP/IP tuning features, advanced ADSL tuning (including lockdown of SNR) and improved firewall modules. With the firmware comes native telnet-support, which has made my ADSL traffic statistics a lot more reliable.

The firmware can be flashed the same way you will flash any other Netgear firmware via the routers admin-console and after a few minutes you will have a more stable and feature rich firmware having features such as:

  • New Busybox: OS totally replaced by recompiled 1.01 version with some revisions needed to achieve better integration with router control interfaces. In particular, many useful commands oriented to: networking management (netstat, hostname, arping, etc), binary file treatment (uuencode-decode) and debug/upload purposes (ftpget-put, wget, tar, zip) have been added.
  • Latest physical ADSL driver available for respective models.
  • New shell execution Command: a powerful filter developed by DGTeam with dedicated nvram libraries which gives the possibility of saving/modifing settings and executing all the various instances directly from the shell command line. Digit: command help to see all its available features.
  • Enhanced iptables-based modular binary firewall, revisited and improved: it doesn’t add/create rules in one shot only, requiring restarts at every setting change, but now, due to its built-in modular structure, it can delete/add each group of rules singularly, without making modifications to the others. Iptables ruleset is written into a temporary file called /tmp/dgteam_rules and then executed at the end of the preliminary preparation step.
  • Url block improved & fixed (possibility of enabling/disabling block as scheduled and to setup more than one trust ip at a time);
  • Firewall SPI (Stateful Packet Inspection Firewall) with manual separated module activation (PORTSCAN/TCP/UDP/ICMP) and sensing parameters regulation;
  • Web interface revisited with full Tigra slider control integration, new frames added on left column to improve panel browsing (links and logout), some new gifs and new customized top frame logos.
  • Additional customized Web CGI interface, containing all procedures needed to process old and new web panel page forms: Setup wizard, Advanced adsl settings, Site blocks, SPI firewall, ALG services, Schedule, Change username and password, Management modes, Diagnostics, WAN settings, Advanced TCP/IP settings, NO-IP, UPNP, Wake On Lan.
  • Advanced ADSL settings with smart adsl multimode, SNR regulation, bitswap, trellis bit, sra, sesdrop, i24k, parity activation and so on (Broadcom models).
  • Advanced ADSL test (tones, medley) useful for diagnostic purpose (instance directly taken from latest original sources on eng web panel).
  • Wi-Fi encryption modes WPA AES, WPA2, WPA2 + WPA, WPA2 802.11 Radius added on GT model (features already present on latest orig release but unlinked on web panel).
  • Wi-Fi WDS (essential) mode added on GT model (instance directly taken from latest original sources on eng web panel).
  • Schedule instance completely rewritten with many bug fixes (midnight restart, day change, wrong GMT fuse on htm page, etc) including full working wireless schedule instance.
  • OpenNTP BSD added (replacing original ntp client) with multi server/pool support acting also as NTP server for local LAN.
  • Telnet (utelnetd with a compatibility patch for dos/win clients);
  • Ssh (dropbear, supporting downloadable rsa key encryption for a secure connection).
  • MTU size finder script (find out largest MTU value available for current network);
  • Advanced adsl driver informations and bit error rate test (Broadcom models);
  • RAM memory optimization (also scheduled every 3 hours);
  • Advanced TCP/IP settings, oriented to: web browsing speed-up, VOIP optimization and P2P management. Settings available are: timestamps, fast recycle, conntracks limit extension, keepalive, probes, tcp/udp/voip/icmp timeout.
  • Wake On Lan client with auto broadcast ip determination and udp port setting (executable both from web panel and command line).

The firmware has been running now completely stable for the last 7 days and with some of the TCP/IP optimizations I did notice a slight improvement in download-speed as well as online gaming. So get your dose of “Jesus firmware” here.