Goodness I am just full of things to talk about today.
I have long suspected that my current router/access point, a Netgear MR814v2 is a little buggy. It seems to have some subtle problems with UDP, which I notice sometimes when I have trouble with voice-over-IP applications. Overall I've been happy with it, except for having to update the firmware when I purchased it (it didn't work with my Powerbook out of the box).
After a bit of browsing around, I've selected another Netgear, the WGT634U to replace it. Since I didn't want to spend another $50 to just maybe, possibly fix this one problem I've been having, I wanted to add a little extra cost justification (and okay, maybe a little extra cost) by getting some "toy" features too. The model that I've selected here has a built-in USB port which can be used to attach a USB disk to its internal file and web server. It's surprisingly hard to find networking gadgets with any fun features. I've been looking around and it seems that everything is "enterprise" scale, which means it's waaaaay too expensive, noisy, and heat-producing for me to get just for personal use.
Anybody have a suggestion for me? I'm open to building something myself as long as it's small, quiet, and fairly low-hassle. (No, buying individual hardware components, assembling them, and building my own embedded linux distribution from scratch is not "low-hassle".)
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April end-month report
2 weeks ago
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I just picked up a Linksys WRT54G to take with me on my east-coast trip (the external antennas provide a better 802.11 signal in my parents' house than my old Roamabout unit). It looks like with a decent firmware load (http://www4.ncsu.edu/~bdferris/linksys_wrt54g/ is a starting point) it will do everything I want out of my current firewall box. In particular, full iptables support and a few small C programs to do ULOG naughty-packet logging. It's basically just a <$90 three-port Linux box, where one of the ports is actually an 802.11g interface, and another has a built-in 4-port hub. Everything else is software: a full 2.4 linux kernel and some shell scripts. No fans, small, cheap, flexible.
The built-in firmware load is tolerable enough that I won't be playing with installing something new until I get home from this trip. The first step will be to make the configuration web page only accessible from the wired network and not the wireless side.
The wrt54g is a great AP, especially if you feel like tinkering with the software. I personally run OpenWRT on mine (most of the time). And if you get the newer Wrt54gs, it has twice as much flash (8M), which according to the OpenWRT developer forum is big enough for a python distribution. :)
I think that the next time I replace my AP, it will be with a WRT54G, and I'll be using third-party firmware. I don't want to have to do a lot of fiddling to get stuff to work, but I really want to be able to fiddle with the things I care enough about.
Derr.....
I was hoping to provide an insightful and useful comment, but I have to say I have no idea what you're talking about.
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