[olug] Linksys router Vulnerability

[Rob Townley]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 2:41 AM, DYNATRON tech <dynatron at gmail.com> wrote:

> thank you chris.
>
> i knew a little bit about the situation, but i had not gotten that
> in-depth.
> i see what you mean now luke. that is a bit of a downer.
> however, i still have to say that it is a good router.
>
> linksys (cisco) must have sold millions of these things.
> i have to give them credit for bringing wireless to the masses at an
> affordable cost.
> if cutting the memory in half is what made it affordable, i'd say it's for
> the greater good.
> if they cut the memory, and not the price, then yeah.....the WRT sucks!
>
>
> On 3/11/08, Christopher Cashell <topher-olug at zyp.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 1:14 AM, DYNATRON tech <dynatron at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > > what problems have you had with them, luke?
> >
> > I think Luke is refering to the fact that starting with the v5 WRT54G
> > Linksys moved from a Linux based firmware to a minimal embedded
> > VxWorks OS.  At the same time, they cut the RAM and flash in half
> > (16MB of RAM to 8GMB of RAM, 4MB of flash to 2MB of flash).  This made
> > the custom firmware projects like OpenWRT and such unusable (at least
> > initially, a couple of them managed to release stripped down, less
> > functional, variants for the v5 on).
> >
> > On the plus side, Linksys released the WRT54GL shortly after the v5
> > WRT54G was released.  The L variant is basically just a renamed v4
> > WRT54G sold to keep those wishing to run custom firmware happy (the
> > 'L' allegedly stands for Linux).  It's a small thing, but I was quite
> > impressed when Linksys did this, as I expect that the number of people
> > who really loaded custom firmware (of which I am one) is an extremely
> > small part of their WRT54G customer base.
> >
> > --
> > Christopher
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
>
>
>
> --
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> dynatron at gmail.com
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i know what you mean Dynatron as i was a big fan of Linksys at one time.
Then i started to critically think about Cisco buying Linksys in 2003 as
buying companies and lawsuits are ways of controlling the market.  Cisco
would have us believe that cutting memory was to save money.  But memory is
cheap especially when you are talking about less than 16MB on a worldwide
distribution scale.  It has much more to do with the fact that open source
versions of the Linksys routers competed directly with Cisco's expensive
(several hundred dollars and more) wireless systems.   FON may not be the
best hardware but it is much much cheaper than any version of Linksys (would
really like to know exactly how much flash and ram comes inside a FON off
the top of my head).  Cisco bought Linksys to control the market - not to
help the consumer.   One of the best competitors to  Cisco Linksys when it
comes to FOSS seems to have been BuffaloTech.  But
http://www.buffalotech.com/products/wireless/
<http://www.buffalotech.com/products/wireless/>  still can't be sold in the
USA.  It is EXTREMELY interesting to me as it should be you that Cisco
Linksys is not on the list of companies that filed an amicus brief in
support of BuffaloTech.  Anyone truly interested in lower prices for the
consumer wireless has to ask why Cisco Linksys doesn't support BuffaloTech
in this lawsuit because potentially every wireless manufacturer may be
barred from selling in the US with the exception of Cisco of course.  Cisco
Linksys indirectly supporting the CSIRO lawsuit is almost the same tactic of
Microsoft supporting the SCO lawsuit.  If Cisco Linksys released an
802.11Nrouter with an open source download, then i might change my
mind, but i
suspect they won't do that if they ever do till the others have been buried.