firmware for Belkin N300 (F9J1002v1)

[shaqblogs2011]

Firstly, Is it advisable to install a custom firmware on my modem-router?

If no issues in installing..,
1. How do i go about installing DD-WRT on Belkin N300 (F9J1002v1)?
(Leaning towards DD-WRT... after googling i noticed this firmware seems to be widely used)

2. Is the procedure model specific...should i do anything differently for my router?

3. Which version of the firmware should i use?

Note: The reason i want to change the firmware is to have bandwidth usage statistics for all pc's together at home. Not sure which firmware has this feature. (Statistics for individual PC's would be great!)

 

[bill001g]

You are going to have to really dig to find this answer. You should not even think to install a third party firmware unless you really know how to find the answers to these questions yourself. It is very easy to get a dead router if you load firmware for a router with exactly the same name but a slightly different hardware revision. It is not hard to load third party firmware but you must be very careful and be sure you know what you are doing.

In general belkin had extremely poor support for third party firmware. I do know that most routers that start with F9 are not supported. Even on routers that do have supported chipset you have to be very careful you do not load these to the DSL versions of the router. There is a extremely limited number of dsl routers supported because of open source issue with distribution of DSL drivers.

 

[shaqblogs2011]

so thats out of that door.

so any way i can obtain bandwidth usage statistics from across all pc's on my home network?

 

[bill001g]

Not real easily. Obviously you could run something the the resource manager on each device and then combine them or set the firewall on each machine to log and then combine that but I am sure that is not what you are really wanting.

Even if you load dd-wrt it does not produce these reports directly. The feature in dd-wrt is called netflow or something similar. It send records to a server for each data flow that you can then run reports on. It is very tough since a router has no place to store long term data for just a router to do this. You might be able to see how much is being used at the instant you look but not much more.

Pretty much this type of report is generated by a firewall which tends to have disk drives. Of course you can use a free one like pfsense on a old PC but it is still a matter of placing this between the end machines and the internet. The hard one when you have DSL is the wireless since it will directly go to the internet and you can't stick anything in between.

If you were to really want to do this I would go the pfsense method since you are going to need a server anyhow. I would get a new router to run your home network..mostly to get the wireless users. You would plug dsl router--pfsense box--new router. Of course I would make sure the new router can run dd-wrt if you ever wanted some advanced feature.

Unfortunately it seems your average person could care less about how much and what is using their connection so the router manufactures do not include this in your average consumer router.