On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 11:44 AM, Neil Bothwick <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, 2 Feb 2012 23:35:03 +1100, Gregory Shearman wrote: > >> I can second the Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH. I run it with Openwrt rather >> than ddwrt and I find it runs flawlessly, though I only run it with a >> few wireless laptops and a wired server. > > What are the advantages of Openwrt? I have one of these but have never > bothered with anything but the stock dd-wrt.
It's like the Gentoo of router distros, you can pretty easily roll your own firmware image with whatever kernel options, packages and features you want included. You can install a web-based management console similar to the one DD-WRT has, or you could manage it entirely through SSH if you want to save space for other things. I think DD-WRT is actually based on OpenWrt, or is in the process of becoming so. That is not to say that DD-WRT does not contain original work, as it certainly does, and they are contracted to write firmware for some new devices that might not generically be supported by OpenWrt yet. I also have WZR-HP-G300NH and wifi suffered constant disconnects and poor performance. The latest OpenWrt updates have gotten better from the driver standpoint, and what really helped link quality was dramatically /reducing/ the antenna power. I still get dropped wifi connection on all of my devices every time someone uses the microwave oven... (my old and slow router did not suffer from that problem). If I had the chance to do it over, I'd get WZR-HP-AG300H instead, since it has 5GHz support.
