"Frank" == Frank Sweetser <fs@WPI.EDU> writes:
Frank> On 10/13/2010 10:26 AM, John Stoffel wrote:
Guys,
I'm looking to replace my WAP54G (802.11bg) wireless access point. I really need to get more speed to the wife's computer, and I don't want to run wires.
I'm thinking I'd like to get something that DD-WRT can run on, and possibly something with dual radios and/or dual 2.4ghz and 5.0ghz band, so I can have a secured network, and an open, slower network for guests.
My home network looks like this:
cable modem <---> router <----> GigE Lan switch <-- clients | | WAP54G
Frank> Congratulations, you're me a month ago =) Heh, so where do you end up putting your new wireless router in your network? Did you replace the core router, or add on? Yeah I'm a professional SysAdmin, but I don't do the network side day to day... so I want to stay secure. Probably way too paranoid, but that's me. Frank> I got pointed at http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/ as a resource Frank> for comparing these devices. I ended up going with the Netgear Frank> WNDR3700, and have been very happy - ridiculous performance Frank> gains, including better internet performance. Nice. Frank> I do have to warn you that I tried dd-wrt on it, and it didn't Frank> work so great. It was a little flaky, and when I tried to Frank> upgrade it to a newer build, I semi-bricked it. (Luckily Frank> these boxes, when bricked, come up in a recovery mode where Frank> you can easily feed it a new image via TFTP, so bringing it Frank> back from the dead was trivial.) Instead I threw openwrt on Frank> it, with dnsmasq, dyndns, and openvpn configured, and it's Frank> been rock solid and blazingly fast. Interesting. I've been reading Newegg reviews and it's been interesting hearing that for some stuff openwrt is better than dd-wrt. Frank> The only glitch there is that it's a little more strict about Frank> wireless security behaviour, so some non-compliant devices Frank> (droid1 phones running android 2.2, in my case) can't associate Frank> at WPA2/AES. Bummers. :] That's why I figure I'll keep around my old WAP54G for wep devices and stuff that I don't care about much. Frank> I've heard very good things about the buffalo devices, Frank> especially since they ship with dd-wrt from the factory. They Frank> don't have the same performance (again, smallnetbuilder has Frank> excellent benchmarks for side by side comparisons), but are a Frank> lot cheaper. One drawback of that particular model at least is Frank> that it's single band, 2.4GHz only. Personally I strongly Frank> recommend going with a dual band device, as 2.4 these days Frank> tends to be a pea soup of interference, while the 5GHz bands Frank> that 11a uses has a lot more open channels available. Yeah, I think I really want dual band, dual radio, gigabit. Going to have to pay for it though. But if the device lasts, I'm not too upset. Frank> Chuck and I had talked about putting together some slides on Frank> openwrt, guess this means I should get started now... Go go go!