I posted a while back a teardown of the VM Superhub 2 router, as VM has “upgraded” to a rebranded Arris TG2492S/CE CM. Alas Virgin Media in their wisdom have decided that simple router features like being able to change the LAN subnet & DHCP server range are far too complex to trust to the Great Unwashed, so they’ve removed them entirely from the firmware, and locked the local LAN onto the 192.168.0.0/24 range.
As my network is already numbered in the 10.0.0.0/16 range, with several statically addressed devices present and other systems relying on these static assignments, using this router would have meant renumbering everything.
Luckily Virgin had the decency to leave the “modem mode” option in the firmware, effectively disabling the WiFi & routing functions & allowing the connection of a third-party router. Some searching for a suitable replacement for the core of my network turned up the Linksys WRT1900ACS. While I waited for this to arrive, some temporary workarounds were needed to make everything function well enough with VM’s crap router.
These routers have been designed as a modern replacement for the venerable WRT54G series of routers from some time ago, with full support for OpenWRT/DD-WRT firmware, and with a beefy 1.6GHz dual core CPU & 512MB of RAM I doubt I’ll be able to knock this one over with too much network traffic! This was pretty much the most powerful router I could afford, and should mean I don’t need to upgrade for a long time. (No teardown of this yet, as it’s taking care of the network at present. Maybe some point in the future I’ll take the plunge).
The stock firmware isn’t totally awful, and has some nice features, but I decided it needed to be replaced with DD-WRT for more security & future flexibility. I’ll leave the firmware flashing stuff for another post 😉
Hi The Engineer,
A thorough set of comments on what you chose to do and why you chose to do it, but seemingly nothing on how you achieved the marriage of these two bits of hardware as far as settings and methodology.
Both would be really appreciated along with a detailed description of the promised venture into DD-WRT,. OpenWRT or whatever third-party firmware replacement you settled on.
Kind Regards and Anticipation,
Bin.
Hi Bin13,
There’s not really much to it when it comes to Virgin Media’s routers & “modem mode”. This just disables all the router functions of the CM & forwards it’s public IP address over onto it’s ethernet ports, effectively turning it into a media converter between the Virgin Media’s Coax network & Gigabit Ethernet. One of these ports is then plugged into the WAN connection of the WRT1900ACS as you would any other modem.
As mentioned in the post, I did flash DD-WRT firmware, but it turned out that I couldn’t get it stable, the router would continually lock up after a couple of hours in service, requiring a reboot. It has since been moved to OpenWRT/LEDE, and has been rock-solid stable since.
Unfortunately the flashing process isn’t really one suitable for a post here, since doing this means taking my entire network offline (including the web server running this blog!), so getting it done as rapidly as possible is a requirement.
Cheers for reading,
de 2E0GXE
I have Virgin Media Hub3.0 Software Ver – 9.1.1802.613 ad would like to install/upgrade to dd-wrt
please email me links and procedure to install
Thanking you my email is prafulblue@gmail.com
Hi Patel,
As far as I am aware, this isn’t possible. Virgin Media keep their routers locked down, the best I can suggest is placing the SuperHub in Modem Mode & installing your own router behind that which can have DD-WRT installed.
Cheers