In a previous blog, I talked about an alternate way to keep your windows PC up to date more efficiently than Windows Update, but no one cared. If I recall, I posted it at the end of the workday, so I should have expected that. This time, it's something anyone that plays games online can benefit from. Oh, and sorry. There really just aren't interesting pictures to go along with talk of router firmwares.

DD-WRT
Several people here know about it already. It's been mentioned in passing as a way to stop the big MS from wallet-raping you because you don't want to run copper across floors. There are a number of improvements over the default firmware of the routers on its huge compatibility list. I'll name just a few that pertain to gaming, but there are plenty more. Before you dig in, the first paragraph in each section is some general info, and the latter paragraph talks about DD-WRT's benefits.

Unlimited Port Forwarding
Port forwarding is the system by which incoming connections are directed to the right device on your network. XboxLIVE uses a connection over port 3074 with both the TCP and UDP protocols. When the 360 talks to LIVE, it knows where to send information, but when LIVE tries to send something to your 360, it can only see the router. Port forward settings tell the router which IP address (and therefor device) that connections coming in on 3074 should go to.

The default Linksys WRT54G firmware Allows for 10 port ranges to be forwarded. If you have a PC and two consoles, you can eat that up pretty fast, with some games using half a dozen different port settings. DD-WRT lets you add port forward and port range forward slots separately and without an arbitrary limit. It's not really an unlimited number because the router needs to store the information and has finite memory, but I have yet to hear of DD-WRT not having enough forwarding slots for a home network.

Static DHCP
DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) is what a router uses to tell a device what IP it should have. To properly use the port forwarding features of a router, you need to ensure your devices always get the same IP address, but DHCP services and port forwarding services are separate. You can manually assign IP addresses on each individual device, but I always found this annoying. My laptop had a couple things on it that needed a port open, but setting a primary address as static made it ignore DCHP on other networks, which was very inconvenient for a mobile computer. Setting a secondary address as static was pointless unless I disabled DHCP on the router completely which was going to be incredibly inconvenient for anyone ELSE to connect to my network.

DD-WRT, among others, offers Static DHCP. IP addresses are automatically assigned by the router, but you can specify a certain IP for a MAC address. The result is static, port forwarding friendly IP addresses, without the subsequent dicking around on each device or inconvenience if a friend just wants to hop onto the wireless for 10 minutes and check their email. It also makes the network much more roommate friendly, especially if said roomie is not as technologically savvy as you are.

Quality of Service
In a perfect world, everyone would play nice and not hog up the bandwidth while you were trying to capture a point, but such is not the case. QoS to the rescue. Some routers have this service by default, but I believe that DD-WRT expands it beyond the home networking norm.

You want to make sure your connection to XBL, PSN or PC online game doesn't get bogged down by someone's bittorrent or limewire? Set the QoS priority for each service. BT is bulk traffic, XBL is premium traffic. Problem is solved, because now your router knows that one kind of traffic gets precident over the others.

DD-WRT Homepage
DD-WRT Wiki