As I mentioned, my Internet connection is a little faster than what my current router supports. I currently have a Netgear FVS114 router, and a WGT624. I purchased the FVS114 router because I wanted something that was extremely stable. The typical consumer grade routers seem to have various stability problems. It's usually easy to see because of the high frequency of firmware upgrades.
My current wireless access point is a WGT624 router, but I don't use it as a router. it just seems to work better having the router an the WAP separate.
Well, I've decided to consolidate (replace) them with a Linksys WRT54GL wireless router. It runs a stripped down version of Linux by default, but that's not even the best part. It's an easy router to run aftermarket firmware on. That basically means I can run a completely different operating system on it, increasing stability and features.
I've hated Linksys for a long time, because I found a lot of their wireless routers to be very flakey. I've read enough reviews about this one to be confident that this is an exception to the rule.
I've spent a lot of time reading about DD-WRT and Tomato. Using one of these firmware's adds a lot of stability, features, and security. You can do some cool things like boost the output power, set up advanced QoS, set up custom cron jobs, and monitor bandwidth usage. I think I'm going to give Tomato a try to see if it suits my needs. I can upgrade to DD-WRT if I need some specific features, but I have a feeling that it will be more "bloated" for my tastes.
I'm specifically interested in boosting the output power so that I get a little bit better signal in my house. My access point is on on one end of the house in the basement, so the signal isn't as good as it could be in parts of the house upstairs. The router also has a standard antenna connector, so I can add a better antenna if I want.
I'm also very interested in the QoS features. Basically, I'll be able to prioritize different types of traffic. For example, I can set up my daily backups to be low priority, so that they don't interfere if I'm using the connection for anything else. Previously, I had set up my backup script so that it would only run at night. Now, they can run all day if necessary, and only use bandwidth that would normally go unused.
You can view my latest router bookmarks at del.icio.us.
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posted @ Monday, September 24, 2007 12:51 PM