Netgear now touting open source WRT-compatible wireless router

[Chip Marshall]

On July 01, 2008, Alex Hewitt sent me the following:
> Bill beat me to the punch on this. I've had plenty of bad
> hardware/firmware from both Netgear and LinkSys. D-Link will also find
> detractors for pretty much the same reasons. The issue for me with
> these brands is the relatively poor support. But then as Bill pointed
> out, the margin pressure on these products precludes the kind of
> support you will see from Cisco, Juniper or other high margin vendors.
> I still use both Netgear and LinkSys when reliability is not a primary
> concern. You can buy a lot of $50 appliances for the cost of one Cisco
> et al router.

Personally, I've never had any problems with my two WRT54G units, both
flashed to the dd-wrt firmware. I've had Netgear routers in past, one
would randomly decide the wireless wasn't going to work, and would
require a power cycle to fix (MR315, iirc.) Another would crash,
presumably due to a state table overflow, when trying to run BitTorrent
through it.

It's good to see more places utilizing open source, which at the very
least should lead toward getting faster fixes for issues like the state
table overflow.

Personally, I'd love to have a Juniper SSG 5 or so for a home router,
but the $700 price tag puts it a little out of my range.

I wonder if any of the commercial boxes are using OpenBSD w/ pf...

-- 
Chip Marshall <chip at 2bithacker.net>
http://weblog.2bithacker.net/                        PGP key ID 43C4819E
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