Ask Slashdot: Life Beyond the WRT54G Series? 427
First time accepted submitter jarmund (2752233) writes "I first got a WRT54GL in 2007. Now, 7 years later, it's still churning along, despite only having one of its antennae left after an encounter with a toddler. As it is simply not up to date to today's standards (802.11N for example), what is a worthy successor? I enjoyed the freedom to choose the firmware myself (I've run Tomato on it since 2008), in addition to its robustness. A replacement will be considered second-rate unless it catered for the same freedom as its predecessor." Is there a canonical best household router nowadays?
TP-Link TL-WDR4300 (Score:4, Interesting)
USB and 128 MByte RAM make many interesting things possible.
With OpenWrt there currently is an annoying problem with VLAN tagging, but there is a patch: https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket... [openwrt.org] making its way into trunk.
Re:The canonical best household router is (Score:4, Interesting)
To a certain degree, he has a point - trying to shoehorn non-networking functions, like web and media serving, into a network device is kind of stupid - you're just going to end up wasting processing cycles on processes that don't have much-if-anything to do with routing.
Now, to say that a WAP should be a WAP and nothing else, ie no routing, firewall, or switching functions (other than what a WAP requires)? Sure, makes a lot of sense... if you're made of money. While you're at it, go buy one of those $10,000 firewall appliances too.
If you're like me, and you are not made of money, and/or you like hacking on stuff, there's nothing wrong with picking up a WRT router at a garage sale for 5 bucks and slapping a fairly feature-rich DD-WRT build on it, presuming you got a model with enough space and power to handle the functions you want to use.
Re:Everyone: please be specific! (Score:4, Interesting)
I definitely second that.
As an aside, you can generally expect a router to support things it does properly, at least you should be able to. Haven't seen too many routers certified as IPv6-ready (there's a comprehensive test suite out there by TAHI, it's not like it would be hard to verify) or even IPv6-capable, although a good number are both. So you can't trust the advertised capabilities as being either complete or correct.
There may also be hardware weirdness that means a feature won't work as expected whether with the regular firmware or a replacement.
Getting just the brand and revision is great, if you only want basic stuff. Which is most people. For freaks and geeks, we could use knowing if there's any really big, ugly omissions.
(I've done compatibility testing between network cards. It is unbelievable - or, at least, it should be unbelievable - how many network chipsets are defective. It's mostly obscure stuff, but bad silicon is expensive to fix, so you'd expect halfway decent testing. It just means all routers will do weird shit, so it's handy to know if it's weird shit that's likely to be a problem.)
Re:+1 for this Post (Score:4, Interesting)
Get a Mikrotik.
Re: +1 for this Post (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:+1 for this Post (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm using a netgear WNDR3800 with gargoyle branded vs of openwrt. Works absolutely perfect, its an older model now but I don't need AC support and it's above average cpu and memory for a router even under heavy usage its barely peaks over 20% capacity and I've never noticed a single time where it has dropped my connection or need to be reset at all in the past 4 years
Memory Usage:17.7MB / 123.7MB (14.3%)
Connections:337/4096
CPU Load Averages:0.07 / 0.03 / 0.05 (1/5/15 minutes)