I strongly believe that UVerse is throttling my video streaming because I get a lot of buffering when watching shows even though the internet is running fine on all my other devices.

I found a good deal on a Netgear Nighthawk R7000 which should be arriving tomorrow.

I'm basically going to follow the DD-WRT Wiki for the R7000 and it seems pretty straightforward.

I was wondering if anyone here had set up DD-WRT on a router before and if they have any tips or pointers that aren't highlighted in the wiki.

Personally, I'm a bigger fan of Tomato over DDWRT. Shibby has a version for the R7000:

http://tomato.groov.pl/?page_id=69
http://tomato.groov.pl/?p=614
http://tomato.groov.pl/download/K26ARM/130/

I flashed DD-WRT on an old router to turn it into a wireless bridge. It was pretty easy and straight forward following the instructions for the device on the wiki.

I bricked a router trying to do this. Was successful on another one however. Follow those instructions exactly.

What specifics make Tomato better than DD-WRT in your eyes?

I'm not necessarily tied to DD-WRT, I just see more about it when I search.

How are you planning on setting this up? You're going to have to go through the U-Verse gateway regardless of what router you're running behind it.

New router connected by LAN to the UVerse modem. This router will connect directly to my VPN and run my Apple TV and Roku so that UVerse won't know the data is coming from Netflix servers.

Sounds like a good plan.

double post

Once you get it setup, make sure and run the following command on your DD-WRT router. If not, you'll have issues with any long downloads or constant connections like streaming video.

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iptables -I INPUT -p udp --sport 67 --dport 68 -j ACCEPT

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Here's some more information on why you need to: http://www.comprepairgurus.com/att-u-verse2wire-gateway-and-dd-wrt-router-in-dmz-mode/

Let me know if you run into any problems. I'm running my own router behind a uverse gateway without any issues.

After reading up on Tomato I decided to stick with DD-WRT it seems that Tomato is easier to install and use, but I didn't have any issues setting DD-WRT up. I basically followed this Instructables article for the flashing/setup. I used the 24345 OLDD build since the change log stated it had the most stable wireless drivers. PIA has a setup page that walks you through the VPN setup for DD-WRT. Now to see if I fixed the buffering issues!

Well, I've run into a bit of an issue here. I have my R7000 connected from my UVerse LAN port to it's LAN port to act as a wireless access point. I was trying to check my VPN status, but it's tough using PPTP unless you check your IP address.

Strangely enough, when connected to the new networks my IP address shows up as my local IP address even when I connect to the VPN on my computer! So the Texas and Midwest servers (on the router) show as my Austin IP address. Also, even when I connect to the VPN via my laptop, my IP address still shows up as local. I swapped over to the main (UVerse) network and tested my VPN connection and when I'm on that network the VPN works as advertised.

Am I not able to set the router up like this for VPN? Do I need to disable the UVerse network and run the R7000 as a router? That's my guess...

Shouldn't that be UVerse LAN to R7000 WAN port and then everything connected to the R7000 to cause everything to flow through the R7000? Also, if you want a newer build try the Kong builds (http://www.desipro.de/ddwrt/K3-AC-Arm/). The newer ones were pretty rock solid (some of the older ones had reset issues) on my R7000 before I moved to my R8000.

Not sure what version of the U-Verse gateway you have, but here's the general plan you'll need to follow (main diff is DMZ+ for older 2Wires vs IP Passthrough for newer NVGXXX) - note, this is how I've done it when I've set up stuff like this -

Get the mac address of your router and write it down/take a picture/etc.
Connect directly to the U-Verse device and disable WIFI, disable Firewall, disable DHCP
Set up DMZ+ or IP Passthrough, depending on your gateway, and have it pass all traffic to your router via mac address
restart the gateway as directed

Connect directly to the router
Set it up as a router and enable DHCP, but set it to be on a different subnet than your gateway (for instance, my gateway is set to be on 192.168.2.254, so my router is 192.168.1.XXX)
Make sure DHCP is enabled and if you are going to want to have any devices use static IPs, I'd leave part of the IP range out of the DHCP assignment set (i.e. let DHCP handle 192.168.1.1-200, but leave 201+ for static devices)
Once that is done, connect a cable from one of your gateway's ports to the WAN port on your router

At this point everything should basically "flow through" your gateway and your router will handle all routing, DHCP, etc. Your router should also take on the external IP, if I recall correctly.

Any type of port forwarding can now be done via the router.

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Shouldn't that be UVerse LAN to R7000 WAN port and then everything connected to the R7000 to cause everything to flow through the R7000? Also, if you want a newer build try the Kong builds (http://www.desipro.de/ddwrt/K3-AC-Arm/). The newer ones were pretty rock solid (some of the older ones had reset issues) on my R7000 before I moved to my R8000.

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Yesterday I was trying to get my UVerse network to stay up so I could have access to the full 50 mb/s. When I had that wireless network still up I got no internet connection when I made the connection LAN -> WAN. However, when I connected LAN -> LAN I would get internet, but the VPN wasn't working. I'm pretty sure I had it set up as a WAP vs a router.

Which of the later builds were you happy with? I only used the older build because the change log mentioned it as the last one to use the older, more stable, wireless drivers.

quote:

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Not sure what version of the U-Verse gateway you have

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We're using the Motorola NVG589

quote:

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Get the mac address of your router and write it down/take a picture/etc.
Connect directly to the U-Verse device and disable WIFI, disable Firewall, disable DHCP
Set up DMZ+ or IP Passthrough, depending on your gateway, and have it pass all traffic to your router via mac address
restart the gateway as directed

Connect directly to the router
Set it up as a router and enable DHCP, but set it to be on a different subnet than your gateway (for instance, my gateway is set to be on 192.168.2.254, so my router is 192.168.1.XXX)
Make sure DHCP is enabled and if you are going to want to have any devices use static IPs, I'd leave part of the IP range out of the DHCP assignment set (i.e. let DHCP handle 192.168.1.1-200, but leave 201+ for static devices)
Once that is done, connect a cable from one of your gateway's ports to the WAN port on your router

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I got pretty close to these settings last night before bed and everything was up and running with my IP address matching my VPN server.

Following this setup I turned off everything on the firewall page and setup the IP passthrough on my UVerse modem. Everything seems to be working fine now, thanks for the help!

One strange thing to note is that whenever I make updates to the router, I have to end on the VPN page and save/apply settings and then reset the router to have it connect to the VPN. If I go adjust settings on the wireless networks and apply settings then the VPN won't connect. Strange, but I think I've got it figured out.

Now that I have this figured out, is there any way to run both networks concurrently so that I can get my full bandwidth when I don't want to connect via VPN? Or is that a bridge too far? So far it looks like my buffering issue is gone, so maybe I just downgrade internet to something around 20mb/s that matches the speed I'll get through the VPN (right now I see 10-15 mb/s depending on when I test it).