On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 9:05 PM, Mike Lovell <[email protected]> wrote:
> Garth Hill wrote: > >> I'm looking to replace my shoddy wireless router and I have the following >> questions for the myriads of (knowledgeable, experienced) sysadmins and >> hobbyists on this list: >> >> 1. Is it preferable to have a regular router and then a wireless access >> point, or a wireless router? >> > Depends on your price limits and the amount of flexibility that you need. > If you want to do very many fancy things on your border to the outside, say > a vpn or voip server, then you could definitely benefit from separate > devices. I do them separate cause I like pfsense for a router. But if you > don't really care about processor or storage intensive functions, combining > them is probably fine. > >> 2. Is 802.11n the way to go yet? >> > Again, depends. I personally don't see the need for 802.11n at the moment. > But then of course, for any thing where I need speed, I use wired > networking. If you want to stream HD over wireless, you might need it. On > the other hand, unless you have some insane internet connection, regular > 802.11g is still faster than your connection to the internet. So unless you > want to transfer a lot of data around your own network, you probably wont > notice a difference. > >> 3. What are your suggestions of a good router and/or WAP based on these >> priorities: reliability, speed, price? >> > Buying dedicated Access Points is usually pointless for home users cause > the routers are cheaper and, by doing simply turning off the dhcp on the > router and setting an different IP address, you have an access point. > > I usually just go for the tried and true wrt54gl. Good solid router that > has been tried over and over again. I have used at least 10 of these with no > problems. So they are reliable. They have good speed if you only need > 802.11g. And the price isn't bad. Usually ~60 from newegg. > > Although, I have been looking for a new router with 802.11a (too many > neighbors creating 2.4ghz noise) but most current ones also have 802.11n. I > am being tempted by the Linksys wrt610n for an access point. From what I > have seen in researching new linksys routers with openwrt, it looks like the > 802.11n chipsets have limited support in openwrt. So if you do want 802.11n > and more features in the router besides what comes with it, you probably > want to separate the router and access point. > I have two access points a wrt54g2 V1 and love it. I also have a wrt610n V2, and hate the POS. I had all sorts of problems with stability and not being able to discover the access point, and finally had to force the thing to g only to get it to work reliably. The problem was that when I would try to connect to the 802.11n it would not connect. I had to connect to my other 802.11g AP and then I could connect to the 802.11n AP... and that was not the end of it. After running on that AP for a few hours it would hang. This is considered a BAD thing, although it taught me to run all my nightly deploys in screen :) Also last I checked it does not support DD-WRT or Tomato. Anyways I don't know if it is just me but I will never buy another wrt610n. On a unrelated note does anyone want to buy a wrt610n V2? :-) > > Hopefully this has been somewhat helpful for you. > > Mike > > > > /* > PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net > Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug > Don't fear the penguin. > */ > /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
