Got to say I'm a bit surprised you're maxing out so early. I do wonder if you aren't maxing out the CPU by running WPA2/802.1x since those APs don't do AES in hardware, but the CPU was sized for crypto to be done in hardware (unfortunately all of the crypto supported in the WRT54G hardware is now broken),
>From memory I've happy run a IT conference of 90-odd networking people from a single WRT54GS running without crypto (ie, open). OpenWRT running bridging and certainly not doing any NAT or other deep packet work. I did replace the pathetic antennas with two real ones and I hoisted the whole thing into the stage lighting rig so it had line of sight to every laptop. So the AP didn't need any fancy RF features (which is a good thing, since the WRT54GS has no fancy RF features). Unfortunately, just one of those colinear antennas is more than your budget. The WRTs are really old APs these days. A modern commercially-oriented AP can do a 300 person lecture theatre. They've also got much better RF systems, and so can squeeze in more than three channels into a site. You might want to see if you can score some from an organisation doing a g-->n upgrade. Perhaps check the usual second-hand suppliers. I'm not sure if Cisco, etc have software relicensing schemes for charities like Microsoft does. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
