Dear VAGUErs, I am overdue for a replacement of my home wi-fi router. I have avoided doing this because I would really like to have a device I control and can trust...and that seems like a very small needle to find in the very large haystack of home router options. So I'm wondering if someone on this list has a recommendation.
Ideally, what I'd like is a dedicated device that is more or less plug and play, but that can be fully configured, troubleshot(?), and managed from a terminal if need be, preferably running some sort of *nix, and preferably with a replaceable OS. The situation I most want to avoid is the one I'm in now: I have a crappy router with no way to manage it except via an afterthought web interface, which provides limited configurability and very little information about what's happening when something goes wrong. I had a Raspberry Pi set up as a router for a while, which worked well and was a breath of fresh air as far as configurability and management goes, but the problem was that it would chew through SD cards. Running a general purpose OS on the RPi apparently uses the filesystem enough that it corrupts the SD card within a month or so if you leave it on 24/7. A device that runs at least enough *nix to provide full management over SSH, but is more reliable and suited for always-on use as a router, would be perfect. I like the idea of using a plug computer as a router that could also run various services (e.g. Tor, a firewall, a home web server), along the lines of the FreedomBox [1]. But I haven't been able to find something that is past the proof-of-concept stage and has been shown to actually work as a dedicated device. Any ideas? Or am I asking to have my cake and eat it too? [1] http://freedomboxfoundation.org/ -- Best, Richard OpenPGP Key ID: CF6FA646 Fingerprint: 9969 43E1 CF6F A646 (See http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~rwl/encryption.html for more information.)
