Some fantastic information in this thread - thanks guys. Right now I'm just looking for a simple appliance that I can recommend to teachers. This would invariably be purchased on their own budget and set up by them, so it needs to be relatively affordable and simple to set up. Our schools are in remote areas, so technical expertise is hard to come by. If I were doing it, I'd be using something like DD-WRT or Tomato, but that's beyond I can expect from a non/less-technical person.
I've had luck with TP-Link devices in the past, so Dave's suggestion might work (sans DD-WRT though). A challenge is that the Sugar environment that the XOs use generate a lot of multicast traffic, which they use for collaboration (XMPP). This can push some routers to their limits. The Netgear WG302 seems to be pretty popular, and I've seen it being used in some schools (albeit, not for so many clients). According to the product information [http://support.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1078], it has "Support for up to 64 users". I'm sceptical, but even if you halve that you have enough capacity to service a classroom. They're somewhat on the expensive side, but better to have something that works reliably. Any thoughts? -- "Our mission is to enhance learning opportunities for the 300,000 primary school aged children, living in remote Australia, by providing each one with a connected XO laptop as part of a sustainable training and support program, by 2014." http://www.laptop.org.au/ http://www.laptop.org.au/participate http://dev.laptop.org.au/participate -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
