Network Appliances

Saturday June 12, 2004
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".)