<rant> I guess I should follow the statement that "you get what you pay for" a bit more carefully. I have been playing with a number of "broadband" routers like the Linksys (see: http://www.linksys.com/Products/product.asp?grid=34&scid=29&prid=20) and the Speedstream boxes to do NAT for me as I have a limited IP assignment from my ISP.
The Linksys boxes seems to do all the things I want them to do but everyone box that I have worked with dies somewhere between 12 and 24 months. I must have replaced about 10 of these guys over the last 3 or so years. What is worse that they just don't die and fail completely. They will flake out on you and then resurrect a number of times until you finally figure out that it isn't the Internet that is causing you grief, it is the blasted router. You can guess, that this week my Linksys box died. It has been dying on me for the last couple of weeks. I thought it was a Linksys switch as they are known to die too. I finally tracked it down to the Linksys router. Thinking with a rather foggy brain as it took me a bit to get to this point, I replaced the Linksys box with a Speedstream Powerline network router (see: http://www.speedstream.com/products_powerline.html). Ok... Now I can view web pages again, but I can't mount my samba shares on my UNIX box through the Speedstream router. I can't even mount my NFS shares. Seems that the Speedstream is doing something strange here. So I get out an extra Soekris Engineering net4521 board (http://www.soekris.com/net4521.htm) and load up FreeBSD on a compact flash to do NAT. I power it up with an extra wall wart I had lying around and all my networking works perfectly and much faster as the Soekris box has two 100Mb/s ethernet interfaces. Sigh. I will never touch a Linksys router and switch or a Speedstream router again. </rant> Tim -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
